2024 Eric Fischl Lecture Series: Matthew Ritchie
April 10, 2024
5:30 pm // Student Art Exhibition + Artist Reception, Cummings Great Hall
7:00 pm // Vanguard Awards + Lecture with artist Matthew Richie and Eric Fischl, Whiteman Hall
TICKETS: Free for Members | $5 for the general public
Renowned for his complex creative visual practice that draws upon vocabularies of science, sociology, anthropology, mythology, and the history of art, 2024 Eric Fischl Series featured artist Matthew Ritchie joins Eric Fischl in a probing discussion about how Ritchie’s interdisciplinary approach to artistic creation transforms our perceptions of reality.
Contemporary American painter, sculptor, author, and Phoenix College alumnus, Eric Fischl is shaping the future of art in Arizona and beyond by providing life-changing opportunities for students, as part of the Eric Fischl Series. The Fischl Series, hosted by Phoenix College and Varitec Solutions and held at Phoenix Art Museum, brings together students, artists, and community members for engaging conversations about art.
About Matthew Ritchie
Since the early 1990s, Matthew Ritchie (b.1964) has developed an installation and painting practice drawing from the vocabularies of science, sociology, anthropology, mythology and the history of art. In his paintings, installations, wall drawings, light boxes, sculptures, projections, artists books and performances, Ritchie describes the generation of systems, ideas, and their subsequent interpretations in a kind of cerebral web, concretizing ephemeral and intangible theories of information and time in a unique and recognizable gestural form that emphasizes the human trace.
Ritchie has exhibited internationally over the past two decades, including solo presentations at the CVAD Galleries at the University of North Texas (2021); Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, TX (2018); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2014); ZKM Karlsruhe (2012), Barbican Theatre, London, UK (2012); Brooklyn Academy of Music (2009), NY, St. Louis Art Museum, MO (2007); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2004), Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX (2003); and Dallas Museum of Art, TX (2001). Matthew Ritchie: A Garden in the Flood, a major mid-career retrospective at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, was on view from November 2022 through March 2023. He was recently the 2018-21 Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist at MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology. Ritchie’s work was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial, the 2002 Sydney Biennale, the 2004 Bienal de Sao Paulo, the 2008 Seville Bienal, the Havana Bienal, and the 11th International Architecture Biennial, Venice, Italy (2008) as well as major exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston, MA among others. Ritchie lives and works in New York.