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.

This dynamic painting is a response to Plan Segnas Sura, a magnificent high valley in the Swiss Alps. The Plan is a post-glacial floodplain, with hundreds of small streams and channels of water that meander and change route across the plateau. These streams facilitate the constant shifting appearance of the area, distributing and redistributing rocks, sand, and other sediment. Anna’s painting, exhibiting earthy and golden hues that evoke the richness of the soil, also incorporates organic material such as small fragments of rock that create a textural experience reflecting the terrain of the Plan Segnas Sura. The materials seem to surge outward from the centre of the canvas, a testament to the endless transformation and flow of the landscape of the mountain plateau.

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.