Anna Freeman Bentley | Reflections
Exhibition Opening | 5 March – 24 April| Private View: 5 March | Canopy Collections
Canopy Collections is delighted to announce Reflections, an exhibition by Anna Freeman Bentley and the first show dedicated entirely to the artist's paintings on paper, as well as the motif of reflection within her work.
Reflections is an apt term with which to underpin the work of Anna Freeman Bentley. It suggests plurality, self-perception and artifice – all themes that she has long explored within her painting practice. Although her chosen subjects are often referred to as ‘domestic interiors’, the worlds she articulates are in fact ones of illusion and refraction. In each work, she blurs the lines between fact and fiction, embedding the viewer in the strange subterfuge of her chosen scene, whether it be a luxuriously furnished house-turned-film set in Saudi Arabia, or the meticulously curated belongings that populate Kettle’s Yard (the modernist gesamtkunstwerk and former home of Jim and Helen Ede, in Cambridge).
These are not reflections of a quotidian reality, but rather an interior sense of self that has been carefully poised for a viewing public - something that is ultimately staged. These fragile projections are reimagined through one final prism, in the form of the deft strokes of Freeman Bentley’s brush. The ragged edges of artful deception sometimes feature too, be it an incongruous light source that suggests a cinematic rig, or a fanciful collection of oversized pink blooms.
Reflective echoes are frequently coded within mirrors, with all their associations of vanity, wisdom and self-knowledge. In Study for Vanity of vanities and Study for Cast room (both 2024) for instance, the artist uses physically imposing examples to dissect the reality of what she is seeing, before reassembling it. These images feature a notable flattening of perspective that is not only informed by these oversized, fun-house reflections, but the reams of photographs the artist captures as vital source material. The adroit interplay of light and darkness, too, is channelled through various reflective surfaces, such as the polished top of a hardwood dressing table, or the diffractions that occur when the sun hits a glass vase filled with water.
These acts of visual distortion are made all the more powerful by a lack of people. Throughout Freeman Bentley’s work the figure is notably absent, a fact that feels particularly potent when we expect to see someone staring back from beyond the mirrored surface. Instead, we must imagine who might populate such a space, based on the impression of their surroundings. In some instances, the briefest of signifiers remain in the form of an incongruous shadow, or else a digitised facsimile broadcast from a monitor.
This is Freeman Bentley’s first exhibition dedicated entirely to works on paper, which form a crucial part of her process. ‘I have to make studies to feel my way through an image,’ she says. ‘Then I can tell quite quickly whether I’m excited about making that work or not.’ While the term ‘study’ holds historical associations of a roughly hewn en plein air sketch, Freeman Bentley’s take the form of large-scale oils that are imbued with the same rich palette and compositional rigour found in her works on canvas. They also hold a sense of immediacy and gestural liberation that the artist admits can be hard to replicate. ‘My work is best when I’m not overthinking it,’ she says, ‘and works on paper give me the biggest sense of freedom’.
– Text by Holly E J Black
Freeman Bentley was born in 1982 and lives in London. Her work is held in international collections, including the Tia Collection, Santa Fe; Museum X, Beijing; Hogan Lovells, London; Hotel Crillon, Paris; the Howard and Roberta Ahmanson Collection, Los Angeles; and The Basma Al Sulaiman Museum of Contemporary Art, Jeddah. She has exhibited at Lyndsey Ingram, London; Frestonian Gallery, London; Massimo de Carlo / Pièce Unique, Paris; GRIMM, Amsterdam; Monica de Cardenas, Zurich; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles and Space K, Seoul.
Anna Freeman Bentley | Reflections
5 March–24 April 2025
Private View: Thursday 5 March, 6–8pm
Canopy Collections HQ
3 Bloomsbury Place
London WC1A 2QA