23 November 2025 –
12. April 2026
One hundred and twenty years ago, a group of young artists set out towards modernity. With luminous colours, radically simplified forms and a new, subjective power of expression, they sought an unmediated access to the world. “We want to convey directly and without distortion what compels us to create“, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner wrote in the 1906 programme of the artists’ group ‘Brücke’.
Founded in Dresden by Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl – later joined by Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller – the group became a symbol of a radical new beginning in German art. Their shared aim was to dissolve the divide between art and life through spontaneity, colour and an unprecedented immediacy of expression.
The exhibition traces the characteristic facets of this movement in a series of thematically structured chapters. It examines how the artists’ cultural critique found expression in their search for freedom, naturalness and intensity of experience, and how their works broke away from the rigid conventions of Wilhelmine art. From the vibrant depictions of the nude in the early Dresden years to the scenes shaped by the dynamism and contradictions of metropolitan life in Berlin, the struggle for a new unity of art and life becomes clearly visible.
Their fascination with what they perceived as the “primitive” also led to an intensive engagement with non-European art and culture, which they viewed as an aesthetic and spiritual model. From today’s perspective, however, this gaze must also be understood as an unreflected appropriation of imagery shaped by colonial contexts. Likewise, some of their works – including depictions of child models – prompt questions about boundaries and gender roles that require critical examination within their historical framework.
With around sixty works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints, the exhibition illuminates the beginnings of a movement that sought to fuse art and life inseparably. At the same time, it invites visitors to reconsider the legacy of the Brücke: as an expression of a radical departure whose creative force – and internal contradictions – continue to resonate to this day.
Artworks
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Two Nudes in the Green, 1913, Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, On long-term loan from a private collection in southern Germany
Erich Heckel, Park Pond, 1914, On long-term loan
from a private collection
Otto Müller, Bathers, 1920, On long-term loan
from a private collection
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, BBlue Acrobats / verso Two Tennis Players, 1914, On long-term loan
from a private collection
Emil Nolde, Exotic Figures I, 1911, Foundation Etta und Otto Stangl
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fehmarn Landscape with Trees, 1914, Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, On long-term loan from a private collection in southern Germany
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Two Dancers, 1910–1911, On loan from a private collection
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, House at the Bend in the Road, 1911, Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, On long-term loan from a private collection in southern Germany
Audioguide
With the audio guide Wild Colours, Free Spirit. 120 Years of the Brücke, visitors are introduced to the ways in which the Brücke artists reimagined colour, form and the woodcut, shaping the emergence of modern art. In roughly 25 minutes, selected stops lead through key works, combining art-historical context with a critical perspective on the group’s notions of freedom and the contradictions inherent in their practice.
