Ridgeway Bennett

Ridgeway Bennett was an artistic collaboration between Jeremy Ridgeway and David Bennett, who happened to be romantic partners. The duo began to exhibit work under their conjoined surnames in 1984 when based in London, United Kingdom. Jeremy was born in London but raised in Zimbabwe and South Africa, whereas David was born in Malawi. The duo, surprisingly, had no known formal art education. They produced various installations across London and exhibited in numerous group exhibitions at Brixton Art Gallery run by the Brixton Artists Collective in the mid to late 1980s. 

In 1990, Ridgeway Bennett exhibited a series of paintings which incorporated their own semen at Wessel O’Connor Fine Art in New York. The gallery, founded by John Wessel and William O’Connor, represented the artistic duo. The exhibition, titled ‘Cum Paintings’, garnered a newfound critical reception for their work, including reviews in Artforum, Village Voice and the New York Times. Reactive Armour (1990), for instance, consisted of a cross shaped frame stretcher with Lutradur. The artists had then covered the surface with a combination of their own semen and wax. Afterwards, the duo added the word “CUM” overtop in bold acrid yellow vinyl. Ridgeway Bennett often played with language and bodily fluids to critically probe the contemporary climate of censorship and AIDS.

Their paintings incorporating bodily fluids went on to be included in several exhibitions across North America, namely Cindy Patton and Christian Walker’s ‘Against the Tide: The Homoerotic Image in the Age of Censorship and AIDS’ (1990) at Nexus Contemporary Art Center [now Atlanta Contemporary Art Center] and TULA Art Center and Galleries in Atlanta, Georgia and David Rubin’s ‘Cruciformed: Images of the Cross Since 1980’ (1992) at the Cleveland Centre for Contemporary Art. The duo had a solo exhibition in 1992 entitled ‘RAM’ at the artist run gallery City Racing in London. There, Ridgeway Bennett exhibited several of their artworks including semen and blood, new text-based pieces and large-scale installations. Ridgeway Bennett’s last known group exhibition was in 1994 in Canberra, Australia in ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS’, curated by Ted Gott, at the National Gallery of Australia. Jeremy Ridgeway died from AIDS related complications months prior to the opening in 1994. David Bennett’s whereabouts afterwards is still unknown. In 2002, three paintings by Ridgeway Bennett were donated by Wessel O’Connor Fine Art to the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York.