Renowned transmedia artist Matthew Ritchie invites viewers to experience the richness and complexity of the world by connecting such fields as philosophy and mythology, epic poetry and music, and history and physics. Interweaving dualities of harmony and chaos, the exhibition offers a meditation on art’s capacity to help overcome social fragmentation—to be a connective tissue that is healing and beautiful.
A Garden in the Flood features dramatic paintings, an architectural structure, and hallucinatory animations, some made through artificial intelligence. At its heart will be a new video work with a sound bed specially commissioned from renowned composer Hanna Benn in collaboration with the Grammy Award–winning Fisk Jubilee Singers and their late music director, Dr. Paul T. Kwami.
At once visually stunning and intellectually engaging, Ritchie’s work is appropriately presented in Nashville, a city where interdisciplinary collaborations are increasingly defining the creative community.
About the artist
Matthew Ritchie (b. 1964, London, England) has been an artist in residence at the Getty Research Institute and the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, as well as a distinguished senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and the Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ritchie’s work has been shown in numerous museums and exhibitions worldwide, including the Biennale of Sydney, Havana Biennial, São Paulo Art Biennial, Seville International Contemporary Art Biennial, Venice Biennale of Architecture, and Whitney Biennial. He has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Dallas Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Moody Center for the Arts, and Saint Louis Art Museum. His work is in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and other institutions worldwide.
This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Paul T. Kwami, the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ music director and our inspirational collaborator on this project.
Organized by the Frist Art Museum
This project is supported in part by
the National Endowment for the Arts
Supported in part by
With additional support from our Picasso Circle
Presented in part by
Exhibition gallery
Matthew Ritchie. The Red and the Red, 2014. Oil and ink on canvas; 82 x 120 x 2 1/2 in. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. © Matthew Ritchie 2014. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Adam Reich
Matthew Ritchie. The Eighth Sea, 2002. Oil and ink on canvas; 99 x 121 in. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. © Matthew Ritchie 2014. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Oren Slor
Matthew Ritchie. Harbinger, 2022. Oil and ink on canvas; 58 x 72 in. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. © Matthew Ritchie 2022. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Phoebe D’Heurle
Matthew Ritchie. Discriminator, 2022. Oil and ink on canvas; 66 x 76 in. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. © Matthew Ritchie 2022. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Phoebe D’Heurle
