Anna Freeman Bentley - Complete Reality

Showcases Anna Freeman Bentley’s paintings exploring the tension between reality and fabrication in spaces.

Anna Freeman Bentley (b. 1982) is an artist based in London. Her painting practice explores unpeopled architecture and interiors, the objects, decoration, and furniture inviting both narrative and abstruser consideration. This publication, Complete Reality, documents Freeman Bentley’s latest series of paintings, which she created after visiting the film set for My Driver & I (2024), a coming-of-age drama set in the port city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

Over the course of the shoot, Freeman Bentley took over two thousand photographs, which she edited and worked from in her London studio. The paintings show lavish rooms, filled with fringed lamps, dusty chandeliers, vast mirrors, and ornate furniture, juxtaposed with the incongruous signs of a film set: screens, leads, computers, and plastic chairs. Exploring the relationship between ＂reality＂ and ＂fabrication＂, the series continues the artist’s interest in spaces that have an inherent tension or transience.

Alongside the paintings that comprise Complete Reality, the publication also includes a series of oil studies on paper that explore additional rooms, angles, and spaces from the film set. Installation images of the artist’s most recent solo exhibitions - Video Village at MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Paris (2024), make shift at Monica de Cardenas, Zuoz (2024), and Complete Reality at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2024-25) - showcase the works staged in different configurations and gallery environments.

In her introduction, Jennifer Higgie considers the interiority of Freeman Bentley’s elusive scenes, and her interest in temporary and unreal spaces. The curator and writer Elisabetta Fabrizi interviews Freeman Bentley about the interplay of reality and illusion in her paintings. They reflect on themes of authenticity and narrative tension, and discuss Freeman Bentley’s earlier explorations of cinema, particularly Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). Kathryn Lloyd writes about the conceptual and historical relationships between cinema, photography, and painting. She analyzes how Freeman Bentley forges an interdependence between these three distinct media, creating an unmistakably painterly language that somehow distils the essence of both film and photography.

In an interview with Michele Robecchi, the artist discusses her recent solo exhibition in Switzerland, make shift. Freeman Bentley reflects on her personal connections to the work, the significance of the temporary and transitory nature of the film set and her use of triptychs, mirrors, and fragmentation to disrupt conventional readings of space. In her contribution, the film producer Georgie Paget offers a speculative film script based on the exhibition Video Village at MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Paris.

Edited by Matt Price and designed by Joanna Deans, the book is published by Anomie Publishing, London.