Video Village
Anna Freeman Bentley
For her first presentation with MASSIMODECARLO, Anna Freeman Bentley exhibits new paintings from her latest series, inspired by her time on a film set in Saudi Arabia.
Drawn to the temporary, fictional nature of movie sets, this interest took Anna Freeman Bentley to an expansive and ornate house-turned-museum in Jeddah. Experiencing how the shooting of a film took over almost every aspect of the former home, this body of work interrogates some of the spaces that surrounded the set itself. Encountering images that imply some center of activity happening elsewhere, the paintings explore the subtle balance between real and artificial, lasting and temporary. As such, the works become a questioning of the contrast between the image constructed through the lens and the one created in a painting.
To accompany this presentation, a film producer has continued the idea of constructed narratives by adopting the role of a scriptwriter and created a movie script. In her text entitled, “A ROW OF CURVES”, an anonymous viewer enters the gallery and responds to the paintings on view.
Artist
Anna Freeman Bentley’s paintings explore the emotive potential of space and its associations with longing. Using architectural imagery, her compositions portray fractured, mirrored spaces that are hard to locate. Referencing a long history of painterly mark making and through a process-driven approach, she constructs painterly environments, inspired by real encountered spaces that propose to push the bounds of interior and painterly space.
Working in series, Anna Freeman Bentley seeks to capture the complex dynamics, atmospheres, and emotional responses that specific places have the capacity to engender. By depicting spaces that seem vacated, where a change of function has taken place, her painting evokes a longing that may be personal or universal; a deep human desire for permanence in a world that shows signs of change.
Anna Freeman Bentley (b.1982) received her BA from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2004 and her MA from the Royal College of Art in London in 2010. In 2019 she participated in the artist residency at Palazzo Monti, Brescia and in 2012 the Artist in Restaurant residency at Michelin-starred restaurant Pied a Terre in London. Her work was included in the Prague Biennale 5 and Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Selected exhibitions include: Massimo de Carlo, Piece Unique (July 2024), Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam; Lyndsey Ingram, London; Frestonian Gallery, London; Space K, Seoul and DENK Gallery, Los Angeles. The artist will also have a solo show in October this year with Anat Ebgi Gallery in Los Angeles.
Her works are included in the Tia Collection, Santa Fe; Museum X in Beijing; Hotel Crillon in Paris; Hogan Lovells in London; and the Ahmanson Collection in Irvine, California.