Anna Franke is a German visual artist whose practice traverses painting, sculpture, installation, and video. Working with natural pigments, fabric, and found materials, she develops process-based works that unfold through prolonged contact with elemental environments—immersing textiles in rivers, oceans, and soil, exposing them to erosion, decay, and transformation. Her gestures are rhythmic, durational, and embodied, positioning the artist’s body within ecological processes as both agent and witness.

She engages the material and affective tensions between human and natural systems. Rather than seeking harmony, she foregrounds friction—the ways in which movement, matter, and weather co-produce form. Through this, she questions inherited romantic imaginaries of nature, situating her work within contemporary discourses on ecology, feminism, and material agency. Her practice is research and ritual, a spiritual journey into the elemental forces of nature. She explores the interplay of sensitivity, fragility, and wildness.

Originally trained in Communication Design, Franke worked as an art director and editorial illustrator in Germany before shifting her focus fully toward her artistic practice. Since 2019, she has lived between Germany, Galicia and Southern Spain, where her work has evolved through deep engagements with place, ecology, body and movement.

She participated in several ecological art residencies like AADK (Murcia/Spain) and JOYA AIR (Almeria/Spain). Hiking every day, she explored the possibilities of connecting her painting practice with nature and her body in movement. 

At JOYA AIR she teamed up with 3 international artists and a curator to launch the Crossing water project. This project addresses the transformative act of crossing water from different perspectives – and nods to their literal journeys across oceans and rivers to meet and work together.