Courthouse artist's work `very personal'.

Byline: BOB KEEFER The Register-Guard

British-born New York artist Matthew Ritchie was named Tuesday as lead artist for the $1 million worth of public art that will be incorporated into the new federal courthouse to be constructed in Eugene.

Ritchie, 38, is a painter known for conceptually based work exploring a visual cosmos of his own devising.

His selection represents an unusual and challenging choice for art in a public building in Oregon. Just more than a year ago, the New York Times called his work `among the most `difficult' in all of contemporary art.'

But on Tuesday afternoon, he sat at a table at Eugene's Excelsior Inn with federal Judge Michael Hogan, who has spearheaded the courthouse project, and talked affably about the relationship between art and the legal system.

"My work is very personal," he said. "It's really about being an individual. And the law is always about a single individual - which is the way I work. A single individual trying to understand everything."

Ritchie, who made his first trip ever to Eugene this week, did not apply for the job. Jon Kvistad, regional adminstrator for the federal General Services Administration, explained that Ritchie was chosen by a committee that evaluated the work of numerous nationally known artists.

The names of three regional artists who will also work on the project will be announced in the coming weeks. Kvistad would not say on Tuesday how much individual contracts with the artists would be worth.

Ritchie does not yet have specific plans for the courthouse art, but said he came away excited after talking with lead architect Thom Mayne.

"He said the building would be all white," the artist said. "What I'd like to do is just draw all over it!"

Hogan praised the committee's choice of Ritchie while admitting he had not previously been familiar with the artist. "Here is someone we think can tell a story," he said, referring to the narrative thread that informs much of Ritchie's work. "And we think we have a great story to tell, about Oregonians and the Constitution and justice and the operation of the courts."

Ritchie does indeed tell stories in his art, but by all accounts they are exceedingly complex.

Flash Art described a recent Ritchie exhibit as "a weird atmospheric continuum, a parallel world, mirroring yet unlike our own: powered by an irrational hybrid of scientific dogma, ruled by the whims of shabby and redundant gods, fallible to the silent pitfalls of poker-chip chance, haunted by the palimpsest ghosts of psychoanalytic folly."

The courthouse, which will cost $70.4 million to construct, is scheduled for completion in 2005.

Ritchie has recently completed other large public art installations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in Japan.

His work was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial in New York. In 2003, he is to have solo exhibitions of his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston.

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Photo courtesy artnet.com Artist Matthew Ritchie's work has been called "difficult.'