Matthew Ricci (b. 1998, South Australia) is a painter working between abstraction and figuration. Trained in mathematical sciences and economics, he turned to painting as the more honest language for what he was trying to understand.
Ricci works in oil paint, soft pastels, charcoal, and graphite on cotton canvas, frequently stretched directly onto concrete walls to hold up against his physical process. Paintings begin in automatism, no preliminary sketches, no planned composition, and accumulate through layers of washes, erasures, and reworking. A back and forth between chaos and control in which figures are discovered rather than made.
His work moves through identity, memory, sexuality, and the body as a site of lived experience. Cultural symbols recur across the paintings, high heels, blonde hair, the contorted figure, each carrying weight without being explained. The tension between performed individuality and authentic identity runs through everything.
The mark-making operates as a form of excavation. What is built up is stripped back; what is hidden surfaces. Recent work has focused on inversion as both process and subject, the shadow side of selfhood rendered visible through the accumulated logic of paint.
In 2025 he was awarded the Chianciano Art Museum Award at the London Biennale and was selected as a finalist in the Waverley Art Prize, Sydney (also a finalist in 2026).
Education:
-
Bachelor of Economics (Advanced), Adelaide University (2021)
-
Bachelor of Mathematical Sciences, Adelaide University (2021)
Group Exhibitions:
-
Waverley Art Prize, Sydney (2026)
-
Maremoto by Peninsula group, Berlin (2025)
-
Waverley Art Prize, Sydney (2025)
-
London Biennale, Chelsea Town Hall, (2025)
-
BAAM (Curated), Berlin art fair, (2024).
Solo Exhibitions:
-
Matthew Ricci at Unkompress, Berlin Vernissage, (2024).
-
CURATED Presents Matthew Ricci, An Afternoon of Live Drawing, (2023).
Prizes & Awards:
-
Finalist Waverley Art Prize, Sydney (2026)
-
Recipient of the Chianciano Art Museum Award at the London Biennale (2025)
-
Finalist Waverley Art Prize, Sydney (2025)
-
Finalist Jackson Art Prize (2025)