Simon Lee Gallery is delighted to announce representation of British artist Anna Freeman Bentley (b.1982, London). The artist’s inaugural exhibition at the gallery will open in November 2023 in London, following inclusion of her new paintings in the gallery’s Art Basel Hong Kong presentation this month.

Freeman Bentley’s practice explores the uncanny within architectural spaces, depicting interiors imbued with a heightened emotional or psychological intensity. The absence of figures enables Freeman Bentley to imply narrative, creating worlds within worlds that contain subtle signifiers revealing the artifice and complex dynamics of manmade environments.

For her most recent series, Freeman Bentley draws inspiration from visiting film sets. This enabled the artist to establish a connection with a determined, temporary site in order to make work that chronicles her relationship to it. The works are heavily influenced by Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, a complex space in which different worlds seem to overlap and interact at once. The series raises questions about displacement and replacement, change and transformation, seen and unseen, aspiration and desire; themes that run throughout Freeman Bentley’s wider practice.

Alongside her conceptual exploration of sentience and architectural interiors, Freeman Bentley’s paintings can be viewed as thoughtful investigations into surface, tension, and the variations in atmosphere evoked through composition. Marrying a diversity of fluid and expressive brushstrokes with a confidence of colour and a masterful understanding of light, Freeman Bentley’s paintings interrogate the emotive and dramatic potential of interior space.

photo: Peter Mallet