REDISCOVERED & REUNITED

Frames and pictures by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
03.10.2024 – 12.01.2025

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The exhibition is dedicated to the Gesamtkunstwerk in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's work: The relationship between picture and frame. For the expressionist painter, picture and frame were inseparable. Kirchner designed an individual frame for almost every work. The exhibition offers an overview of his artistic approach to frames in analogy to his development as a painter, from the founding of the "Brücke' artists" group in Dresden to his creative period in Davos.

Thanks to the collaboration with the Kirchner Museum Davos, the contribution of the Kirchner estate and the Galerie Henze & Ketterer in Wichtrach/Bern as well as international loans from museums and private collections, around 60 exhibits make it possible to experience how Kirchner conceived the picture and frame as a unit. In addition to the rare original picture/frame combinations that hardly exist today, pictures that have only recently been reunited with their frames can be seen here. One example of such a reunion is Kirchner’s painting "Blick ins Tobel", 1919–1920. Thanks to a unique, international museum cooperation, the painting and frame is presented to the public as a unit for the first time. The fact that many paintings and frames still suffer from separation is examplified by the empty original Kirchner frames also on display. Two works with faithfully reconstructed frames show how paintings whose original frames have been irretrievably lost can be given back part of their former identity.

The exhibition REDISCOVERED & REUNITED highlights what has hardly been seen or considered so far, even by researchers: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's frames are an integral part of his art. Paintings and frames form a unity – high time to rediscover them as such!

Exhibition Catalogue

Rediscovered & Reunited – Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Frames and Paintings
EN Exhibition Catalogue, 49,95 €
Sample & Order

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2025 in the museum

Ruprecht von Kaufmann: Life Between the Chairs
29.11.2025 – 15.03.2026

CHOSEN. FURTHER WORKS FROM THE COLLECTION
15.11.2025 – 15.05.2026

Resonant Silence
Stone Sculptures by Kubach & Kropp, 05.08.2025 – 15.03.2026

BUCHHEIM'S HOUSE
Permanent exhibition: Reconstruction of Buchheim's villa in Feldafing

Africa & Oceania
Presentation of objects from the Buchheim Collection in the tower room on the 3rd floor of the Buchheim Museum

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Kopf mit Pfeife, 1913, Brücke­-Museum, Berlin, Photo: Nick Ash, Berlin