Digital Art Education: Multi-Touch Table for Over 10.000 Sketches at the Kirchner Museum in Davos

From November 2019 to April 2020, the Kirchner Museum Davos presented the exhibition “Kirchner’s Sketchbooks: From Pencil Stroke to Hologram.” The exhibition focused on Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s numerous sketchbooks — those small, often unassuming notebooks in which the artist developed his visual ideas before they became paintings, prints, or sculptures. The curators had identified over 600 specific references to works: lines and motifs that can be traced from the sketch to the finished piece.

This look back at a notable project that took place several years ago shows how recom art care supported the Kirchner Museum Davos in bringing this exhibition to life — not with a scanning project, but with an interactive museum station.

Unlike most of the projects described on this blog, this one wasn’t about digitizing original works but rather about digital art education. The Kirchner Museum Davos already had an extensive digital image collection — around 10,000 images. The real challenge lay elsewhere: How do you make a collection of this magnitude accessible to museum visitors in the first place?

An archive containing 10,000 images is a treasure trove for experts. For exhibition visitors without prior knowledge of art history, however, it can be overwhelming — without targeted guidance, the exhibition’s actual narrative — the connection between sketch and finished work — gets lost in the sheer volume of material. Addressing this very issue of digital mediation was the central design challenge of the project.

recom art care created a multi-touch table for the exhibition as a standalone museum station.

The approximately 10,000 images were tagged with metadata, allowing visitors to make targeted selections and navigate the collection—instead of scrolling through an unstructured collection, they could specifically access references to works, motifs, and contextual connections.

This transformed a mere collection of data into an accessible interpretive tool: Visitors could trace for themselves at the table the more than 600 connections between sketchbooks and finished works that the curators had identified—from pencil sketch to finished work, as the exhibition title puts it.

The project demonstrates that recom art care’s work extends beyond traditional image digitization: The question of how to make a large digital collection accessible to and present to a broad audience is also among the tasks that museums bring to recom art care.

Are you planning a similar cultural outreach initiative or a project to make your digital collection accessible?

Contact us. We will find the best solution.