The images in this series are related to Ritchie's recent body of work A Garden in the Machine which includes paintings, drawings, film and sculpture. The entire project is an outgrowth of Ritchie’s experimentation with a type of machine learning known as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which treat images as data from which to develop new imagery. Each one of the prints in this series is a unique iteration of the output of the machine's processing, mirroring the way the GAN constantly produces new images with every new piece of "information" fed into it.

Ritchie uses this type of machine learning system to generate images based on classification systems, or the essential characteristics of any given genre of art. This results in an image that is an archetype, model or template and ultimately tells us more about how humans describe and categorize objects, than anything about computers. For this series Ritchie started with European landscape paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After the existing paintings are fed into the GAN, the output is a new model, or a picture of possibility.

The Albumen printmaking technique was chosen because this was the first method used to copy and disseminate photographs of art during the nineteenth century and is the foundational technology for art historical research. No longer used today, this method of reproducing reproductions gives us an idea of how the audience for these types of paintings would have encountered them at the time.

About the Artist

Since the early 1990s, Matthew Ritchie 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.

Matthew Ritchie (b. 1964) has exhibited internationally over the past two decades, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2014); Barbican Theatre, London, UK (2012); Brooklyn Academy of Music (2009); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2004); 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, opens in November 2022. He was Visiting Artist at MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (2018-21); and visiting scholar/artist in residence Getty Research Institute (2011/2012). Ritchie’s work was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial, the 2002 Sydney Biennale, the 2004 Bienal de Sao Paulo, the 2008; and has had 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.