Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
By VICTOR SLEDGE July 21, 2024
It goes without saying, but there are so many ways we can choose to see ourselves as different from one another. The borders between us can grow as tall as we want them to. It depends on how high we decide to build them. But one thing we share in common no matter how high we build those borders is the Earth we build them on. And that’s where artist Anna van den Hoevel focuses her work.
van den Hoevel seems to see worlds within our world, and she creates work that captures that experience. It could be diving into crystal blue waters, hiking up the side of a mountain or trudging through a concrete jungle. Whatever it is, it’s more than just a moment. It’s an amalgamation of travel, nature, the people around her and the emotions she finds within these travels. She freezes all these factors in a mental screenshot before they spill out onto a canvas.
“I grew up half in Austria and half in Menorca. My parents traveled a lot with us. I was always on the move since…forever,” van den Hoevel explains.
Her love for travel and the people she meets is what fuels her work. And her love of nature especially impacts how she walks through the world.
“You can sit me in nature for 100 years, and I wouldn’t realize it. I could sit in a field staring at the structure of the grass, and I’d be fine,” she says.
From thousands of feet in the air on a plane, admiring the structure of the world below her like in her series Birdview to threading a field of grass with her fingers, van den Hoevel can get lost in the natural form of our planet.
“Our whole world is made of structures,” she explains. “Everything looks so small and insignificant, but in a way it’s connected. It also makes me feel so small, like I’m nothing. And that’s good. Because we are.”
For van den Hoevel, the sensory experience of the world is important to how she perceives any given place. But so is how she feels when she’s there. What’s complicated about that is that the Earth is relatively predictable and benevolent. People are not.
“My work is a lot about nature, but it’s also about if I can connect with the world and people around me,” she says.
At the root of her practice, van den Hoevel’s work is grounding. It honors the Earth and her travels in a way that reminds her and her audience of our tiny places in the world.
van den Hoevel’s appreciation for her emotions and how they underscore her travels and experiences throughout the world around her creates more dynamic and genuine work that brings her authentic voice to life. Her work isn’t only about the beauty of the places she visits, the opportunities she’s been afforded, or the majesty of nature; it’s about the holistic human experience with the world that is sometimes stamped by things we can’t control, like each other.
Even outside of professional relationships, van den Hoevel is the type of person who can go to a foreign country, walk into a grocery store, and walk out 30 minutes later with a new friend. These human interactions become as much a part of a place as the soil and the sky. The spirit and zeitgeist of the people in a place she visits and how she receives them also has a say in how the work comes out.
Her work in Berlin, for example, feels heavier than others.
“There isn’t another place like it in the whole world. Berlin is this super wild place. I love the weirdness and the people, who are so off, because I feel more normal there,” she says.
But as with any place, there’s more than one layer to it. In a city where there’s so much art and nightlife, where you might say someone could go to escape, there’s also punishing winters, way more concrete than trees and a sea of people there for a myriad of different reasons, good or bad.
“There’s so much more than beauty. There’s so much darkness and violence. I met so many lost souls there,” she remembers.
van den Hoevel felt those elements while in Berlin, and it bleeds into her work in the series Berlin 0-XII. It feels weighed down rather than grounded. It mirrors the energy of the city, its people, and more specifically, the feelings van den Hoevel had while there.
It’s moments like these where van den Hoevel completely opens herself up to the brutal imperfection of the world around her and how it impacts how she feels that we see her work shine. By the time she makes it back to her studio, the work she makes is a sensory and emotional reflection of the good, bad and ugly she encounters. And that’s what makes her practice so palpable.
Wherever her work is showing, there’s an invitation for viewers to see the world through van den Hoevel’s eyes and heart. Her relationship with traveling, the people she meets and how she feels in those moments tell a story that feels specific to van den Hoevel but universal to us at the same time. Through her work, you see the borders in our world fall to allow any viewer into a place that may exist across the world from them.
And as long as she continues to pay as much attention to the beauties of the Earth and the people she's around as she does to the depths of her emotions, we’ll continue to see art that keeps those borders open.
You can learn more about van den Hoevel’s work on her website: https://www.annavandenhoevelstudio.com/ and follow her on Instagram: @annavandenhoevel WM
Victor Sledge is an Atlanta-based writer with experience in journalism, academic, creative, and business writing. He has a B.A. in English with a concentration in British/American Cultures and a minor in Journalism from Georgia State University. Victor was an Arts & Living reporter for Georgia State’s newspaper, The Signal, which is the largest university newspaper in Georgia. He spent a year abroad studying English at Northumbria University in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, where he served as an editor for their creative magazine before returning to the U.S. as the Communications Ambassador for Georgia State’s African American Male Initiative. He is now a master’s student in Georgia State’s Africana Studies Program, and his research interest is Black representation in media, particularly for Black Americans and Britons. His undergraduate thesis, Black on Black Representation: How to Represent Black Characters in Media, explores the same topic.