Anna Freeman Bentley: Complete Reality

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Anna Freeman Bentley Complete Reality on view at 4859 Fountain Avenue from October 26, 2024 through January 11, 2025. This is Freeman Bentley’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and presents ten new oil paintings. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, October 26 from 5-7pm.

Exploring the uncanny within architectural spaces and interiors, Anna Freeman Bentley’s work cuts through nostalgia with striking psychological intensity. The meta-fictional scenes of her paintings for this exhibition are the culmination of the past few years of work inspired by the artist’s visit to a film set, shot on location in an historic house museum in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Freeman Bentley reveals the art and artifice of constructed image-making and the distinctions and tensions between what is created for the camera lens and the one composed by the artist’s brush. Depopulated by crew or actors, these quiet scenes hint at some recent action. In What you leave behind (2024), an unmade bed has been moved into the center of the room, seemingly in a rush as the carpet to the left remains ruched. Or as in Four corners (2023), a suite of four oil on panel paintings present four corners of a room leaving us to imagine what activity may be occurring in the middle space, just out of frame, pulling focus to memories or moods that such a space may evoke. Other works such as Perhaps one day (2024) or It’s all been done (2024), break the proverbial fourth wall. These staged environments are peppered with clues such as video cameras, lighting equipment or an incongruous, plastic bottle of water, visible traces of crew and production that allude to our behind-the-scenes viewing perspective.

Complete Reality absorbs all of these details, the imaginary, the disorienting and the overlaps between what is real and what is staged. Freeman Bentley presents us with repeated vignettes of bedrooms, seen from numerous angles, rooms used as sets. Works such as For a season and Somewhere in between appear to show a child’s bedroom, although the decorations and objects differ enough as to hint at different stages of childhood, creating visual suggestions of the passing of time. Her use of mirrors becomes a hovering, mise-en-abyme, a fracturing of perspective that underscores the point that these interiors are illusions; more will be revealed. By depicting the same room, the artist explores multiple perspectives, rhythms, and contexts; reality is disrupted, enhanced, and fragmented. Together the works situate a layered story within a single context. Using the “built environment” as a metaphor for our perceptions about reality, Freeman Bentley circumscribes the possible, improbable, and paradoxical into a great whole of awareness.