Archive

Never Apart.
Frames and Pictures by the
Brücke Artists

16. November 2019 to 
15. March 2020

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Village Corner, 1910, Brücke-Museum, Karl und Emy Schmidt-Rottluff Stiftung © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

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Painting in wooden frame, painted with white and red line: Two men at a table with a wine glass and a bottle of wine, two other men in the background

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Weinstube, 1913, Oil on canvas, Brücke-Museum, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

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Painting with wooden frame: Woman, looking at her hands in front of a mirror

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Frau bei der Toilette, 1929, Oil on canvas, Brücke-Museum, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Mädchen in Southwester, 1912/20, Privat Collection Switzerland

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Colorful Dance, 1933, Sammlung E. W. Kornfeld

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Mueller with Pipe, 1913, Brücke-Museum

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“I never display unframed pictures in exhibitions … if I do something, I do it as properly and as well as possible, otherwise I would rather not do it at all,” wrote Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in 1937, thus emphasising how crucial the picture frame was for him. The exhibition Never Apart highlights this bond and for the first time explores the special role and importance of the frame for the Brücke artists.

Indeed, Erich Heckel, Otto Mueller, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff also designed unique frames for their paintings: they employed special profiles, added carved ornamentation, and painted them in colour – always with a view toward creating a compositional unit alongside the picture’s content. Schmidt-Rottluff’s elaborate carvings clearly demonstrate his sculptural understanding of the frame. In the case of Kirchner, the brush often left the canvas and coloured the wood in tones used for the image, thus blurring the line dividing the two.

Be it in exhibition catalogues, on postcards or on the Internet – images by Brücke artists have always tended to be presented without their frames. Yet precisely, a gaze beyond the pictorial field proper offers unique insights into the artists’ ideas and intentions. The exhibition presents an exploration of the Brücke to include the artistic design of the picture frames, which along the lines of the Gesamtkunstwerk, expands the very notion of the image itself. Thanks to countless loans from national and international institutions, as well as many originally framed paintings from the Brücke-Museum collection, Never Apart offers visitors an overview of this hitherto neglected field of artistic endeavour.

 

Exhibition room Two paintings on the wall, each with historical photographs and texts next to them

Installation view Never Apart. Frames and Pictures by the Brücke Artists, 2019, photo: Mathias Völzke © Brücke-Museum

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Exhibition room with various works and two frames without pictures

Installation view Never Apart. Frames and Pictures by the Brücke Artists, 2019, photo: Mathias Völzke © Brücke-Museum

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Exhibition room several paintings on the wall

Installation view Never Apart. Frames and Pictures by the Brücke Artists, 2019, photo: Mathias Völzke © Brücke-Museum

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Exhibition room various paintings, wooden armchairs with leather upholstery in the middle of the room

Installation view Never Apart. Frames and Pictures by the Brücke Artists, 2019, photo: Mathias Völzke © Brücke-Museum

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The walls of the exhibition room are full of empty frames, each bearing a pink label. In the left-hand corner, a screen with two armchairs in front of it

Installation view Never Apart. Frames and Pictures by the Brücke Artists, 2019, photo: Mathias Völzke © Brücke-Museum

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The exhibition is curated by Werner Murrer and presented in cooperation with Buchheim Museum in Bernried (28 March–5 July 2020).

You can watch the accompanying film with Werner Murrer by Sebastian Eschenbach, Sammler und Jäger Filmproduktion GmbH, here.

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Never Apart
Frames and Pictures by the Brücke Artists (2020)

Exhibition Catalogue
Eds.: Werner Murrer, Lisa Marei Schmidt & Daniel J. Schreiber
Texts: Richard Ford, Detlef Göschel, Wolfgang Henze, Olaf Lemke, Eva Mendgen, Werner Murrer, Bernd Müller, Tanja Pirsig-Marshall, Gerd Presler, Christiane Remm, Tessa Rosebrock, Marianne Saal, Elisabeth Schlesinger, Lisa Marei Schmidt, Daniel J. Schreiber, Katrina Schulz, Aya Soika, Maria Tischner and Kirsten Voigt
Publ.: Koenig Books

A part of the exhibition catalogue is also available online thanks to WERNER MURRER RAHMEN.

456 pages
300 colour images
German
ISBN 9 783960 987284
€ 49,95
Out of stock

2020-2025
Never Apart
Frames and Pictures by the Brücke Artists (2020)

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Staff

Werner Murrer, Curator
Lisa Marei Schmidt, Curator
Daniela Bystron, Curator of Outreach
Katrina Schulz, Assistant Curator
Nora Hogrefe, Assistant Curator of Outreach/lab.Bode