Lot 20: The Midnight Line, 2008

WORKS FROM THE THYSSEN BORNEMISZA CONTEMPORARY ART COLLECTIONS TO BENEFIT ICELAND'S LIVING ART MUSEUM  
The Midnight Line, 2008
Mixed media installation comprised of acrylic paint or vinyl decal, marker, digital projection system. Installation dimensions variable; as illustrated: 250 x 1000 cm. (98 1/2 x 404 in).     

 Reykjavik Art Museum, Experiment Marathon Reykjavík, 15 May – 17August, 2008

 Exhibition catalogue, Reykajvik Art Museum, Experiment Marathon Reykjavik, Reykjavik, 2008 (illustrated)

 Acquired directly from the artists

The Midnight Line, a monumental and powerful multimedia installation, is a seminal work from an ongoing collaborative effort between the critically acclaimed BritishAmerican artist Matthew Ritchie and the award winning architecture and design practice from New York, Aranda\Lasch. Standing in front of this vast projection, the beholder cannot but be mesmerized by the beautifully delicate organic forms that envelop the walls of the room in which the work is installed. Part sculpture, part drawing, part map, the ethereal Midnight Line is a futuristic depiction of the repeated molecular forms which make up the universe. Biomorphic designs are repeated on a gigantic scale to create a spellbinding artistic ensemble, a true feast for the visual senses.
Throughout his prolific oeuvre spanning painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, Matthew Ritchie has attempted to represent the entire universe and the structures of knowledge and belief that he uses to understand and visualize it. Drawing from his imagination as much as the more traditional referential materials of religion and science, Ritchie's art defines the theory of creation and man's attempts to comprehend its vastness. The present lot, The Midnight Line, with the added input of the celebratedAranda\Lasch, truly embodies the essence of Ritchie's artistic endeavor.
Speaking at the recent 11th VeniceArchitectural Biennale, Matthew Ritchie elaborated on his collaborations withAranda\Lasch. Referring to another but similar installation from their joint body of work, The Evening Line, Ritchie said ‘It's a collaboration between an artist, an architect and an engineer. It's an attempt to develop a structural system that can be used. It's a modular system that you can build up. Its fractal, scales up and down, so the smallest part is the same as the biggest part. It's a model of the Universe, of how the Universe fits together as the internal geometry of the four forces that hold the Universe together.This is the drawing unfolded on the walls that can be folded up and made three-dimensional again because there are some models of how the Universe works that give the impression that the Universe may in fact be a kind of projection.What we experience is a projection of higher orders of reality so just in the way that this is a projection of a three dimensional space inside a two dimensional space and possibly the idea is that our reality is a projection of a multi-dimensional space inside a larger multi dimensional space.' (Matthew Ritchie speaking to Wesley Miller at the 11th Venice Architectural Biennale, 2008)