Matthew Ritchie | "The Bad Need", 2001 | (for Parkett 61)
Read a Parkett text on Matthew Ritchie
Parkett Vol. 61
Quote from Parkett
“Matthew Ritchie is interested in the trace, the mark, the diagrammatic and inscriptural aspects of science. Powerful abstractions of the world, these graphemes are made to intersect in his work with other abstractions drawn from popular culture: computer avatars, Japanese anime, film noir. Looking at his paintings is like being in one of Dorothy’s cyclones—one minute a one-celled organism wheels by, the next minute a sequence of skulls streams along from a school chart on evolution. All are bound together in a furiously active matrix of colors applied in umixed adjacent tones... the flat juxtapositions make it seem map-like... although there is enough play with values to destabilize that reading and create some sense of depth in the whirling forms.”
Peter Galison & Caroline Jones, Parkett No. 61, 2001
"The Bad Need", 2001 (for Parkett 61)
Wall work, cut-out of adhesive-backed vinyl,
approx. 36 1/4 x 40 1/4” (95,2 x 106,6 cm),
to be installed at a height of 41 1/2” (105,5 cm) o.c. on a wall surface
(with a minimum size of 96 x 72” / 243,7 x 183 cm)
painted with the eggshell acrylic paint supplied as part of the edition,
accompanied by an annotated artist’s book,
Ed. 70/XXVIII, signed and numbered
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Artist Document
In this sketch Matthew Ritchie lays out the page flow of his Insert for Parkett 54. The next photo shows an installation view of Ritchie's wall work "The Bad Need" at Parkett's exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zurich (with Marlene Dumas' work to the right).
Artists’ Contribution to Parkett 100/101
“Perhaps Parkett could only ever have been Swiss, a treaty signed between rivals who become friends, a layover at an airport bar that somehow turned into an all night session at a leather club, that endless dinner party conversation you always wanted to have. At times a pleasure-garden, at others an exhibition, a plea, a call to riot and a call to prayer, at times, I have simply stopped really reading other art magazines for a while, realizing Parkett was enough. (I'm sure I'm not alone in that). The physical body will be missed, the faithful arrival of love letters to the art-world it so beautifully supported and documented.
But that it's analog, embodied span is ending, having reached the limits of it's messianic life on earth, is surely no co-incidence. Parkett always seemed to be one step ahead of the game and it's metousiosis was probably inevitable. We are all partially digital now, in ways that were both foreseeable and unforeseeable, we are all signal and noise, our corrupted data trails and incorruptible souls diagrammed across the ever vaster spaces of the very small, the micro-nano-bio-quantum frontier of the soon-to-be possible. By it's very nature, convivial and challenging, Parkett will join that commingling without dissolving, the essential host of all tomorrow's parties.
I will miss you, but you already haunt the future.”
-Matthew Ritchie
Parkett Text
Read a selected text on Matthew Ritchie
Artist Insert
Matthew Ritchie’s Insert for Parkett no. 54
Artist Video
In this short video excerpt Matthew Ritchie talks about some aspects of his art.