Anna van den Hövel

18 Apr-2 Jun 2023

World Strips IX, 2022, Mixed media on canvas

Overview

Adventure and a fervent desire to explore our planet form the heart of Anna van den Hövel’s art. Spending a childhood between the island of Menorca, the Austrian Alps and the urban environment of Munich, Anna developed an insatiable hunger to experience every corner of the world, curious to discover the array of environments – both natural and cultural – and the sensations that they inspire in her.

Travelling across continents and never staying still for too long, Anna’s journeys fuel her art, providing inspiration through the sights and emotions that she encounters along the way. Using photography to capture snapshots of her travels – often taken from above, giving a bird’s-eye view – in the studio Anna fuses these visual mementos with her own emotional responses to a landscape, creating evocative, abstracted representations of places from her explorations.

For Anna, the physical creation of her artworks is an intuitive and reactive process, using various materials to create layered, textural paintings. The artistic process is an extension of Anna’s journey, often revealing aspects of her own perceptions that were yet unknown. When painting, she enters into a symbiotic relationship with the materials, responding to the way they behave on the canvas and shaping her vision through their particularities.

Creating paintings that are highly personal, Anna shares her unique perspective while also inviting an emotional response from the viewer, hoping to encourage reflection on our own experiences and opening our eyes to the bigger picture.

Artists