Complete Reality

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. 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: leads, computers and plastic chairs. Mining the relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘fabrication’, the series continues the artist’s interest in spaces that have an inherent tension or transience.