Anna Freeman Bentley (b. 1982) is an artist based in London. Her painting practice explores the built environment, architecture and interiors, inviting emotive, psychological and semiotic readings of space. This publication, Complete Reality, documents Freeman Bentley’s latest series of paintings, which she created after visiting the film set for My Driver and 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 analyses 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 completed her BA at Chelsea College of Arts, London, in 2004, and also undertook an Erasmus exchange at Kunsthochschule Weissensee in Berlin in 2003. She received her MA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2010.

About the Authors

Anna Freeman Bentley (b.1982) is an artist based in London. She completed her BA at Chelsea College of Arts in 2004 and received her MA from the Royal College of Art in 2010. She has had recent solo exhibitions at MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Paris, Monica de Cardenas, Zuoz, and Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles.

Kathryn Lloyd is a writer and editor based in London. She has written for publications including Art Monthly, Art Review, Apollo, Burlington Contemporary, Flash Art and The White Review. She is Contemporary Art Editor at The Burlington Magazine and was previously Editorial Manager at Central Saint Martins.

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.

Michele Robecchi is a curator and writer based in London, where he works as Commissioning Editor for contemporary art at Phaidon Press. He is the author, together with Francesca Bonazzoli, of Mona Lisa to Marge: How the World’s Greatest Artworks Entered Popular Culture (2014) and Portraits Unmasked: The Stories Behind the Faces (2020).

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