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 to live the sensations that they evoke 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 responses to a landscape, creating evocative, abstracted representations of places from her explorations.

The title of this painting, Fotiá, means ‘fire’ in Greek and the dynamic tongues of painting flashing across the canvas evoke the heat of naked flames, spots of paint mimicking the fire as it spits and flickers. This painting may have been inspired by a certain memory of Greece, its abstracted energy reflecting the vivid sensation of the heat of a fire.

In her paintings, Anna does not seek to create accurate representations of a landscape; instead she aims to translate her personal experience of a place, fusing visual stimuli with emotional memory. The artistic process is a continued journey of discovery, and it is often only during the actual making of the artwork that certain elements of her own perceptions are revealed to her. Painting, for Anna, is an instinctive and reactive process, and she constantly adapts according to the behaviour of the materials on the canvas, entering into a symbiotic relationship, which allows her to convey her experiences through a unique, personal artistic language.