Anna Beller is a contemporary artist born in Berlin in 1984, where she continues to live and work. With a background in architecture, she approaches painting with a strong sense of composition and spatial awareness. In her “Lacquer Works”, Beller develops a distinctive practice in which colour becomes simultaneously image carrier, material event, and atmospheric space. Dispensing with traditional tools, she pours and directs viscous lacquer in a repeated, ritualistic process, allowing gravity and flow to act as active co-creators. Her work enters into a contemporary dialogue with Abstract Expressionism, particularly the staining techniques of Morris Louis and Paul Jenkins, while exploring the balance between control and chance.
You are a member of the jury for the current Open Call by New & Abstract. What does it mean to you personally to be part of a jury engaging with contemporary painting?
I have been observing Alexander’s keen instinct for New & Abstract for quite some time. I think it’s fantastic to now take part in the selection process myself! This is my first time working in this format; last winter I curated a group exhibition, though I was already familiar with the artists involved.
For me, painting is a vast field of experimentation. Mutual inspiration, overlaps, and cross-pollination naturally happen ever more quickly via the internet, which makes it all the more challenging to assess differences in quality. With its physical exhibitions, New & Abstract creates a sense of community among artists that I find highly valuable in what is often quite a solitary profession. I’m very much looking forward to discovering new positions!
In your “Lacquer Works”, gravity, flow, and material properties become active participants within the image. What fascinates you about this interplay between control and the autonomous behaviour of paint?
In my process, I work simultaneously with intense concentration and the idea of letting go: the works should convey presence and clarity. The flow of colour is fundamental for me—I’m drawn to the raw force and physicality of viscous paint running down the surface; often, droplets of lacquer remain visible along the lower edge.
Within the abstract pictorial spaces I create, colour does not appear as a means, but as a field of presence and perception. It must not be merely a flat surface; rather, it should be rich in detail and depth in order to create spatiality. This is where the notion of the paint’s own agency begins. I find it exciting to step back after the act of concentrated pouring and to be surprised, at times, by the drying process. Directed composition and chance intersect.
I work without tools. I pour the paint from containers and guide it by moving the support. I think this gives the works a greater sense of freedom and intuition; forms appear stronger in themselves, almost effortlessly created, rather than fixed by a brush.
Interestingly, I began my “Lacquer Works” in 2023 within an experimental field between digital—weightless and immaterial—and physical art: “phygital art”. Collectors seemed partly saturated by the sterility of digital art and recognised my engagement with real material. The first lacquer works were sold as photographs combined with a digitally drawn grid overlay as NFTs.
At the same time, viewers noticed similarities to computer-generated generative art, which I also find fascinating—my practice follows a strict logic, such as the repeated pouring of “colour stripes” and the logic of gravity, yet with an inbuilt element of chance. During the drying process, pigments behave almost like pixels.
The unpainted white surface plays an important role in your work as a space of resonance. How do you think about emptiness or silence in painting?
In my abstract pictorial spaces, colour appears not as a means but as a field of presence and perception.
As the central bearer of the image, colour requires space—ideally, in my case, the white untreated ground, along with a larger white area as a counterbalance. Only this white space can absorb and offset the sheer force of the sometimes immense pours of colour.
For purely practical reasons, I also find the initial white paper or canvas highly conducive to concentration. My coloured lacquers are often transparent, and they require radiant light (white) from beneath in order for layers of colour to interact at all.
Finally, my painting also references figures of Abstract Expressionism such as Morris Louis, Paul Jenkins, and Helen Frankenthaler, all of whom worked experimentally with raw, unprimed surfaces for similar reasons.
The process of your work is based on the repetition of a ritual in which each outcome is different. When do you feel that a painting is “finished”?
The repeated ritual is a kind of training process, involving developments and new attempts.
I believe that through my many years of professional experience (also as an architect), I have developed a highly trained eye for design and composition, allowing me to make decisions quickly. These decisions require a certain level of trust and confidence. The relationships between colour, white space, tension, and calm must be balanced, while still challenging the viewer—it’s a fine line.
The painting should probably give me the sense that there is a “more”—a “more” in the universe, or at least a spatial expansion in the furthest corners of our minds.
I usually work serially on several pieces at once, which also facilitates my curation: works I don’t find suitable are quickly discarded and destroyed.
What are you currently working on—and what can we look forward to seeing from you in the near future?
In April, I have an exhibition with a somewhat stricter, very minimalist concept: “2 colours” (Kunstraum Benther Berg, Hanover, 19 April–3 May, co-curated with Carlota Gomez, Kunstverein Hannover). I will be showing only works created through the interaction of two colours. Here, too, the reduction of colour is not about lack, but about concentration and new fields of tension generated by colour.
In autumn, I will have a two-person exhibition in Hildesheim at Galerie Stammelbach-Speicher titled “Directed Chance”. Minimalist street photography will meet frozen movements of colour from the studio.
And my studio can be visited without prior appointment on 9–10 May as part of the “Atelierspaziergang Hannover”.
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