I Visited Frameless In London: ‘The Marmite Of Art Exhibitions’

Is there an audience for digitised paintings? I went to Frameless to find out if this is just a gimmick or if this could be the future of art exhibitions.

At £27, is Frameless worth the ticket price? I think so. While the exhibition won’t please everyone, it does offer a unique art experience that I haven’t experienced since Tate Britain’s Sensorium exhibition which I thoroughly enjoyed.

In comparison, the current exhibition at Tate Modern costs £20 so Frameless is a little more expensive than the average art exhibition in London.

What to expect from Frameless

Frameless consists of four rooms, each dedicated to a different style of painting. Each room shows a video loop of the paintings that last anywhere between 17-25 minutes, so the full duration of Frameless is around 90 minutes. In 3 of the 4 rooms, the video is projected against all four walls of the room, accompanied by a cinematic soundtrack.

The first room was actually my least favourite. Pillars, which are covered in mirrors, can obstruct your view depending on where you are. There are around 8 benches, but they fill up pretty quickly. Most people sat on the floor on the edges so not to obstruct other viewers. I was unfortunately sat with a pillar in view. Maybe this limited my experience, but I also think some paintings work better in this medium than others. For example, Edvard Munch’s The Scream was unimpressive.

What Frameless does excel at is helping the viewer appreciate each shape and line as they explode and fall into place in the painting. It really highlights each stroke of the paint brush that makes up a whole painting. However, this wasn’t enough to save the second room, the Impressionists.

You lose the physicality of brush strokes in Impressionist paintings which can’t recreate the thickness when viewed in real life. It’s unfortunate as Impressionism is my favourite style of painting. Another disadvantage of this projected medium is you lose the vastness of the paintings.

Frameless’ last two rooms are where the exhibition and medium shines. The third room focuses on abstract classics such as Mondrian, Malevich and Klint. The room is set up differently from the other three rooms, instead favouring screens placed angularly to each other (conforming to the abstract work on show). The video projections are cast onto the screens, which are at the same time see-through so you can view other screens too. This creates a wonderful viewing experience of colourful shapes and lines dancing to a jazz soundtrack.

The last room showcases beautiful landscapes which really transport you and make you feel like you’ve stepped into a painting. This is what I thought the exhibition was about, that immersive feeling that looking at a painting in an art gallery lacks. It’s a shame it’s taken the last room to pull this off.

While several of my favourite paintings of Frameless to experience were in the last room (Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples by Joseph Wright and Derby and The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich), if I had to choose one it would be Rembrandt van Rijn’s Christ in the Storm on the Lake of Galilee. The floor I’m sitting on projects a calm sea which makes me feel like I’m gently floating, until the storm thunders into view and the ship bounces on the waves.

Final thoughts

Art purists may baulk at the idea of classics shown in the form of digital projections, but this medium could introduce art to a whole new audience which can only be a good thing, right?

Frameless is perfect for kids. For example, they can interact with the brush strokes on the floor by stepping on them in the Impressionist room. Colourful shapes and lines forming a picture reminds me a little of Art Attack which was a huge influence on my love of art at a young age.

I think adults alike can enjoy Frameless for it’s focus on each shape and line that creates a painting too. This isn’t something I consider when I visit an art gallery for example. I left Frameless with a greater appreciation for the skill needed to paint these classics.

If you’re looking for a more traditional viewing experience of the classics, I thoroughly recommend Tate Britain’s Walk-through of 500 years of British art which is also free.