Matthew Ritchie

Have you heard the latest rumor that painting is dead? The alleged crime scene was the Colorado State Fair, where a picture made by an algorithm won a blue ribbon. For compelling proof that painting is, in fact, alive and thriving in the age of A.I., see “The Garden in the Machine,” Matthew Ritchie’s new show at the James Cohan gallery (through Oct. 15). The strange, seductive oil-and-ink canvases (including “Battle of the Trees,” above) were painted this year by the Brooklyn-based British polymath, conceived in cahoots with a form of A.I. known as generative adversarial networks, which the artist fed a diet of databases containing centuries of landscapes, portraits, and more, much of it owned by the Met. (From 2019 to 2021, Ritchie was a visiting artist at M.I.T.’s Center for Art, Science & Technology, which has worked with the museum on machine-learning projects.) The results—primordial-soup abstractions, rendered in the artist’s hand on six-foot-wide surfaces, in a palette of ectoplasm and viscera, with grace notes of Eden—are haunted by their human ancestors, from the anonymous sculptors who carved the Green Man on medieval churches to the German Surrealist Max Ernst, who shared Ritchie’s obsession with science. On Sept. 24, the gallery hosts a conversation between Ritchie and his fellow deep thinker, the painter Carroll Dunham. (Cohan; Sept. 10-Oct. 15.)