Mobility and Grandeur

Anna Freeman Bentley (b. Freeman, 1982) is a painter based in London. Her practice explores the built environment, architecture and interiors, inviting emotive, psychological and semiotic readings of space. This, the artist’s first monograph, features over seventy works spanning her career to date, offering a journey through the built environment that takes the viewer into realms as diverse as psychogeography and heterotopias, romanticism and modernism. From the needs and desires of individuals to those of the different communities that make up urban life in cities and towns today, her paintings open up questions about displacement and replacement, decay and rebirth, change and transformation, public and private space, social and economic mobility, aspiration and desire, buildings and people. Seeking to go beyond the visible and tangible and to explore ideas of faith and the sacred within space, Freeman Bentley’s work looks through the fabric of our physical environment to ask about what lies behind, into the dialogue between matter and spirit.