Matthew Ritchie: Surrender to the Diagram

Diagrams are the pivotal mental architecture for exchange between the multitudinous spaces of memory, fantasy, language, metaphor, instruction and prediction.  By proposing new conventions of connection, diagrams can both reinvigorate theories of picture and extend the possibilities of agency within them. The exposed, enacted, diagram is a trace of our collective efforts to articulate and negotiate that almost impossible circumstance – reality itself.

Participants will be invited to make, draw, move and collaborate as part of the workshop. All materials will be provided. For further information on this please contact [email protected]

“Diagramming features prominently in Ritchie’s work, involving mathematics, methods of categorisation, systems of perspective and projection, and attempts at visualising the immensity of digitally built space. In his hands, these systemic attempts at ordering the world proliferate in every direction, creating complex resonances between diagrams, drawings and sketches.” Kelly Chorpening

Surrender to the Diagram forms part of Ritchie’s ongoing project to explore the diagram as an essential mode of artistic practice and offers both an artist’s history of the diagram and a partial overview of its status, presence and use today. As well as the large scale drawing in A History of Drawing at Camberwell Space, variants of this project have been installed at the University of Houston; CUE Art Foundation, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; ESMoA, El Segundo, California; and the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork. A related text focusing specifically on Graham Harman’s diagram has been published in Realism Materialism Art (Bard CCA, 2015). An artist edition published by the Getty Research Institute and an exhibition at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, Texas, are forthcoming.

Matthew Ritchieʼs (b. 1964) installations integrating painting, wall drawings, light boxes, performance, sculpture, and moving image are investigations into the complex and transient nature of information. His works describe generations of systems, ideas, and their subsequent interpretations in a kind of cerebral web, concretizing ephemeral and intangible theories of information and time. Ritchie has engaged in many cross-disciplinary collaborations, extending his own projects to explore the possibility of shared systems and aggregations in contexts as diverse as opera, contemporary music, architecture, horticulture, urban design, theology and science.

Matthew Ritchie’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including the Whitney Biennial, the Sydney Biennial, the Sao Paulo Biennial, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Seville Biennale, and the Havana Biennale, and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and other institutions worldwide, including permanent large-scale installations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Food and Drug Administration headquarters and Cornell Tech. He is currently a mentor professor in the Graduate Visual Arts Program at Columbia University, New York.

For Drawing Circle Members and Patrons interested in this event please contact Silvia Denaro [email protected]

We are also able to offer a limited number of free tickets to Matthew Ritchie's formal lecture on 26 January, for Drawing Circle and Network members. Please see here for details: https://drawingroom.org.uk/events/lecture-matthew-ritchie-surrender-to-the-diagram