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 that reduces the scale and significance of individual details such as buildings and rivers – 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 multi-layered Oyster evokes the physicality and motion of the ocean, alluding to the richness of the biodiversity supported by the great seas of our planet. The organic materials also reflect the texture of the oyster shell, often rough on the outside, yet smooth and jewel-like on the inside. Further, meditation on the process by which pearls are created – through a single grain of sand entering the oyster’s shell that the oyster then surrounds in layers of protective material – gives greater meaning to this work, suggesting that precious things can be hidden in unassuming places.

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.