Michele Robecchi

Anna Freeman Bentley (b. 1982) is an artist based in London. Her painting practice explores the built environment, architecture and interiors, inviting emotive, psychological and semiotic readings of space. This publication, Complete Reality, documents Freeman Bentley’s latest series of paintings, which she created after visiting the film set for My Driver and I (2024), a coming-of-age drama set in the port city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. Over the course of the shoot, Freeman Bentley took over two thousand photographs, which she edited and worked from in her London studio. 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: screens, leads, computers and plastic chairs. Exploring the relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘fabrication’, the series continues the artist’s interest in spaces that have an inherent tension or transience. Alongside the paintings that comprise Complete Reality, the publication also includes a series of oil studies on paper that explore additional rooms, angles and spaces from the film set. Installation images of the artist’s most recent solo exhibitions – Video Village at MASSIMODECARLO Pie`ce Unique, Paris (2024), make shift at Monica de Cardenas, Zuoz (2024), and Complete Reality at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2024–25) – showcase the works staged in different configurations and gallery environments. In her introduction, Jennifer Higgie considers the interiority of Freeman Bentley’s elusive scenes, and her interest in temporary and unreal spaces. The curator and writer Elisabetta Fabrizi interviews Freeman Bentley about the interplay of reality and illusion in her paintings. They reflect on themes of authenticity and narrative tension, and discuss Freeman Bentley’s earlier explorations of cinema, particularly Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). Kathryn Lloyd writes about the conceptual and historical relationships between cinema, photography and painting. She analyses how Freeman Bentley forges an interdependence between these three distinct media, creating an unmistakably painterly language that somehow distils the essence of both film and photography. In an interview with Michele Robecchi, the artist discusses her recent solo exhibition in Switzerland, make shift. Freeman Bentley reflects on her personal connections to the work, the significance of the temporary and transitory nature of the film set and her use of triptychs, mirrors and fragmentation to disrupt conventional readings of space. In her contribution, the film producer Georgie Paget offers a speculative film script based on the exhibition Video Village at MASSIMODECARLO Pie`ce Unique, Paris. Edited by Matt Price and designed by Joanna Deans, the book is published by Anomie Publishing, London. Anna Freeman Bentley (b.1982) is an artist based in London. She completed her BA at Chelsea College of Arts, London, in 2004, and also undertook an Erasmus exchange at Kunsthochschule Weissensee in Berlin in 2003. She received her MA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2010.

The first comprehensive monograph on groundbreaking neo-conceptual artist Tavares Strachan, whose diverse practice speaks powerfully to today’s cultural climate Tavares Strachan is arguably one of the most important artists working today. His open-ended practice offers distinctive points of view on a broad range of urgent social and political themes: archaeology, history, geography, music, science, and extreme climatology are only a few of the subjects he has explored to create allegorical exhibitions that tell of colonialism and cultural displacement, human aspiration, mortal limitation, and the space race. Strachan’s extensively researched projects are often monumental in scale and scope. Created in collaboration with thought leaders and organizations across a wide spectrum of fields, his projects are also expansive in reach – The First Supper, Strachan’s massive sculpture at London’s Royal Academy, was one of the most popular art pieces exhibited in 2024. In his birthplace Nassau, Strachan established the scientific research platform BASEC (Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center). In 2018, in collaboration with LACMA, Strachan launched ENOCH, a 3-U satellite bringing to light the forgotten story of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first Black astronaut to be selected for any national space program. ENOCH circled the earth for three years in a sun-synchronous orbit before re-entering on December 2021. This timely monograph, created in close collaboration with the artist, reveals the breadth and impact of Strachan’s work. Part of Phaidon’s acclaimed Contemporary Artists Series, the book includes a conversation with Strachan; text contributions from writers and experts including Emma Dabiri, Gavin Delahunty, and Michele Robecchi; a studio visit with specially commissioned photography; and a comprehensive chronology of Strachan’s career.

Marshall, widely considered one of America s greatest living painters and inspired chronicler of the African American experience, has sought to diversify the art historical canon. In the late 1990s, he began working on a series of comics in response to the absence of authentic black characters and authors in the mainstream. Marshall s comic offers an alternative reality focused on the main character, Rythm Mastr, and his young protege, Farell, superheroes whose powers derive from the seven gods of the Yoruba pantheon. Marshall s characters debate history, philosophy, and politics in vernacular black English using the graphic novel medium to create an empowering, utopian blend of science fiction and Afrofuturism. Initially serialized in a daily newspaper and presented as a Carnegie International installation, it has appeared in various incarnations over the past two decades, including light boxes, paintings, graphic prints, and drawings. This volume is the most comprehensive look at the character, its genesis, and its evolution.

The practice of Chelsea School of Art and Goldsmiths College graduate Greg Rook (b.1971, London) explores the rich visual history, curious cultural politics and often complex ideologies of those who seek to start a new life or wish to lead alternative lifestyles. From pioneers travelling to new continents to those wanting to stay put and live self-sufficiently, Rook invites us to join him on his own aesthetic and critical journey through a world of colonies, communities, communes and cults.By means of figurative painting that pushes the boundaries between realism and lyricism, Rook captures something profoundly revealing in terms of the hopes, dreams and successes as well as the disappointments, disillusionment and disasters that radical departures from home life and mainstream society can entail. For some, utopias can turn to dystopias, the Romantic imaginary can turn to tragedy, the sublime can turn to misery. For those fleeing oppression, however, it can be completely the opposite – newfound freedom, affluence and happiness. Rook’s oeuvre, which incorporates cowboys and communists, agrarians and anarchists, believers and book-burners, depicts how the relationship between people and land is regularly fraught with issues, especially when migration and a clash of mindsets or ways of life is involved. What are brave new worlds for some are threatened old worlds for others…This hardback publication, the first monograph to be devoted to the work of Greg Rook, has been co-published by Vento & Associati and Anomie to coincide with a substantial mid-career survey exhibition of the artist’s work being staged by Vento & Associati at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan in spring 2019. Featuring approximately fifty illustrations of paintings and works on paper made by Rook since 2006, along with an introduction by London and Milan-based critic and curator Michele Robecchi and a significant newly commissioned essay by Matt Price, a leading voice in the field of contemporary British painting, the publication offers an engaging and pertinent commentary on Rook’s long-standing painterly investigation into how people choose to live their lives.Vento & Associati is a Milan-based company operating in global contexts that specializes in strategic cultural communication within fields such as public affairs, corporate and social responsibility, and cultural fundraising. Vento & Associati manages a programme of exhibitions at the Fabbrica del Vapore as part of the Spazi al Talento initiative of the City of Milan.

The book presents a series of new works produced by Adel Abdessemed for the MAC’s/Museum of Contemporary Arts in Grand-Hornu. The Algerian-born French artist Adel Abdessemed (b. 1971) works in a wide variety of media including animation, installation, performance, sculpture, and video; through his art he addresses contemporary themes and he reflects the bleak picture of the present day. His works, unsettling in their simultaneous beauty and raw reality, have made Abdessemed one of the most visible international artists of our time. This volume is composed of two distinct parts, each showcasing and examining one of two series of brand new, site-specific works created by Abdessemed for the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Grand-Hornu and the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon.Distributed for MercatorfondsExhibition Schedule:MAC’s, Grand Hornu (03/04/18–06/03/18)Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon (03/09/18–07/08/18)