Matt + Miles Ritchie’s “Heads Up!” at Spoke Art SF.
Currently on view at Spoke Art (Please contact them for appointments) in San Francisco, California until March 28th, 2020 is Matt and Mile’s Ritchie’s “Head’s Up!”
As father and son, the two share undeniably similar artistic styles as well as a mutual love for comics, film, TV, music, video games, and everything pop. Both in their individual works and in their collaborative ventures, the duo pays homage to a vast range of pop culture subjects - from the 1970s-era Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica of Matt's early years, to the Masters of the Universe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles of Miles' childhood, to our modern day CGI-heavy superhero multiverses, and everything in between. Though they are inspired by many of the same pop culture icons, their joint exhibitions offer perspective from two very different generations - while Matt's presentation is steeped in decades of fandom, Miles renders beloved characters with fresh eyes.
Each with his own individual style and personal fandom history, the Ritchies use wood as their common base medium - distilling all their favorite 2-dimensional characters and icons into crisply crafted and invitingly tactile 3-dimensional pieces. Matt often adds heavily layered paints to embody brightly colored graphics and crossover humor, creating a stylistic flatness that seems both an ode to its 2-D inspirations as well as an outright rejection of it. Miles, however, tends to incorporate more natural exposed wood of the relief form itself - allowing light, shadow, grain, and texture to tell a story different than his father's.
As the name suggests, “Heads Up!” is a collection of the heads of Matt and Miles' fandom favorites. In contrast to their previous explorations of figurative action, posture, environmental context, interactivity, and object representation, this new body of direct facial portraits presents a streamlined overview of the combined Ritchie fandom - allowing the audience to view “Heads Up!” head-on.
Supersonic Note: Definitely was late on featuring this - this entire virus situation has stressed me the crap out - but this is a fantastic exhibition.
Stay inside, support artists and make art.
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