Matthew Ritchie Announced as Montserrat’s 2016 Commencement Speaker

Published: March 25, 2016

We are very pleased to announce that artist Matthew Ritchie will address the Class of 2016 and receive an honorary degree from the College at Commencement this May.

Ritchie will host a public lecture Thursday, May 12, 7 – 8:30 pm at The Cabot Theater, 286 Cabot Street, Beverly, MA.

A selection of his works will also be on view in the Schlosberg Gallery. Thanks go to Leonie Bradbury, Gallery Director and Curator, who was instrumental in securing this wonderful artist as our honored guest.

Matthew Ritchie was born in London, England, in 1964, and lives and works in New York. He received a BFA from Camberwell School of Art, London, and attended Boston University. His artistic mission has been no less ambitious than an attempt to represent the entire universe and the structures of knowledge and belief that we use to understand and visualize it. Ritchie’s encyclopedic project (continually expanding and evolving, like the universe itself) stems from his imagination, and is catalogued in a conceptual chart replete with allusions drawn from Judeo-Christian religion, occult practices, Gnostic traditions, and scientific elements and principles.

Ritchie’s paintings, installations, and narrative threads delineate the universe’s formation as well as the attempts and limits of human consciousness to comprehend its vastness. Ritchie’s work deals explicitly with the idea of information being “on the surface,” and information is also the subject of his work.

Although often described as a painter, Ritchie creates works on paper, prints, light-box drawings, floor-to-wall installations, freestanding sculpture, websites, and short stories, which tie his sprawling works together into a narrative structure. Drawing is central to his work. He scans his drawings into the computer so that images can be enlarged, taken apart, made smaller or three-dimensional, reshaped, transformed into digital games, or given to someone else to execute.

See more about Matthew Richie:

Excellent Art 21 Episode

Lecture at ICA and interview with Curator

NY Times Review on Boston ICA Residency

Cate McQuaid review, Boston Globe