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.

Anna Freeman Bentley (b.1982) is an artist based in London. She studied painting at Chelsea College of Art and Design before graduating with an MA from the Royal College of Art in 2010. She has had solo exhibitions at venues including Wolfson College, Oxford (2017), Husk Project Space, London (2015), Workshop Gallery, Venice (2012), and Galerie Kollaborativ, Berlin (2007). Selected group exhibitions include ‘London Now’ at Space K, Seoul, South Korea (2017), ‘Der Kuhle Glanz’ at 68projects, Berlin (2017), the East London Painting Prize (2015 and 2014), the Prague Biennale 5 (2011), and Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2009). Freeman Bentley has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including Breathing SPACE Residency, London (2015-16), the ERDF New Creative Markets Programme, London (2013-14); Artist in Restaurant, Pied à Terre, London (2012); The Florence Trust Artists Residency, London (2010-11) and The Chelsea Arts Club Trust Award, London (2009).

Jennifer Higgie is frieze editor-at-large and the presenter of Bow Down, a podcast about women in art history. She is the author of the novel Bedlam. Her new book The Mirror & The Palette, on historic women’s portraits, will be published in 2021. She is on the judging panel of the John Moore’s Painting Prize 2020.

Kathryn Lloyd is a writer, editor, and artist based in London. She has contributed to various arts publications including Art Monthly, Art Review, Apollo, Burlington Contemporary, MAP, and The White Review. She is Contemporary Art Editor at The Burlington Magazine.

Dr Elisabetta Fabrizi is an art historian, curator and writer with a specialisation in the interrelations between art and film. She brings to her writing an extensive empirical experience of curating film and video projects, including as Head of Exhibitions at the British Film Institute and as Curator at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.