Anna Van Den Hövel is an artist whose passion for adventure and a fervent desire to explore our planet are at the heart of her 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 World Strips series differs from the artist’s other paintings that take the physical appearance of a place as their starting point. Instead, World Strips embody a representation of the world at an emotional level, describing on the canvas the feelings and perspectives that, like physical attributes of the world, form the very essence of our nature.

Inspired by the one-dimensional division of the planet into longitudes and latitudes, for this series Anna builds meaning not through the layering of materials on the canvas, but rather through the complexity of the plane from which they have been projected onto the surface. The results are energetic, dynamic works that disclose an inner nature and reveal Anna’s musings upon what it means to be human.