“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 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.