Nahmad Projects presents The Studio, a series of new paintings by Anna Freeman Bentley (b. 1982) in dialogue with twentieth-century masters.
Photo: Stephen White & Co.
The artist’s studio has long been more than a place of work. It is a theatre of the self, a space where the act of looking turns inward, where the world is examined and reimagined. This exhibition takes that concept as its premise, spanning an entire century, tracing the studio as a living subject; from Picasso’s home-studio of the 1950’s to Anna Freeman Bentley’s East London studio of today. It was a single painting that set this conversation in motion: Pablo Picasso’s L’atelier (The Studio), painted in 1956 at La Californie, his ornate villa above Cannes. For Picasso, the studio was a self-portrait in itself, a working environment he returns to obsessively throughout his life, not as a documentary record but as a Cubist dissection of presence and absence. Exhibited alongside it are further landmark interiors and still lifes by Georges Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, Raoul Dufy and Henri Matisse, each staking a different claim on what the artist’s workspace can hold.