After the Frame Comes Off: Frameless London and the Portraits Brought to Life

London, Marble Arch. Descend the stairs from the din at street level and a series of dark, column-free halls opens out one after another. In one of them, on a certain night, a portrait spread across the whole wall holds your gaze — and blinks. Nelson Mandela, Amy Winehouse, William Shakespeare: faces that ought to have stayed still inside their frames are stretched from floor to ceiling, breathing, beginning to speak. The venue is called Frameless. It is, literally, a museum without frames.

What this essay traces is the question of how far the venue has pushed a single simple operation: taking the frame off. This journal has already looked at Atelier des Lumières, which projects classical painting into the space of a former Paris foundry, as the immersive museum run as show business. Frameless is the British counterpart, but since entering a long-term partnership with Britain's National Portrait Gallery in 2024 it has been ceasing to be a mere apparatus for adapting old-master painting. When the portraits of a living museum are invited into a room whose frames have been removed, what happens?

The Invention of the Room Without a Frame

Frameless opened on 7 October 2022. Set into a basement fronting Marble Arch, across some 30,000 square feet (about 2,800 square metres), it claims to be the first permanent large-scale digital immersive venue in Britain. The property had originally been designed as a set of enormous column-free boxes laid side by side, and that condition — large spaces without pillars — became the condition of the projection surface itself.

The technical core lies in projection and sound. More than fifty Panasonic three-chip DLP laser projectors cover walls, floor and ceiling seamlessly with 479 million pixels and a million lumens of light, and 158 speakers fill the whole space with sound. The method itself — overlaying the images of multiple projectors to turn the inside of a building into one continuous picture — is by now standard vocabulary for the immersive venue. The visitor does not "look at" a painting from a fixed distance; the visitor "stands inside" it.

Here is one pole of the category this journal calls "GA (画)." Painting was originally a plane enclosed by a rectangular frame. The frame is an apparatus that draws a boundary between the one who looks and the picture that is looked at. Frameless removes that boundary and turns the image inside out across the entire surface of the architecture. The venue's name is itself a declaration of the operation.

Where Frameless differs decisively from Atelier des Lumières, however, is that its space is not one great hall but is divided into several rooms of differing character. The permanent display is woven across four galleries: Beyond Reality, which shows work from Surrealism to Symbolism through a design that distorts perspective; Colour in Motion, which makes Impressionism respond to the visitor's movement through motion tracking; The World Around Us, a circuit of the world's cities and landscapes; and The Art of Abstraction, which turns abstract painting into a multi-layered maze. Kandinsky, Monet, Dalí, Van Gogh, Canaletto, Rembrandt, Klimt — more than forty famous paintings by some two dozen artists are adapted under a different spatial logic in each room. One circuit takes about seventy minutes. Rather than repeating the same painting on a single wall, the visitor walks across rooms of "picture" whose characters differ.

A Provenance in Show Business and Stagecraft

What makes Frameless work is not a lineage of museums but a lineage of show business and stagecraft. Its chief executive, Richard Relton, comes out of sport, events and hospitality. Its chief creative officer, Scott Givens, heads FiveCurrents, the production outfit behind the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics. Chief technology officer Simon Kentish and founding partner Andrew Wells underpin the technology and the business, while the selection and interpretation of the paintings is handled from the art-historical side by Rose Balston and Rosie O'Connor of ArtscapesUK. Sound was taken on by Autograph Sound, systems integration by Creative Technology.

Frameless, in other words, is a venue in which staging techniques for "moving an audience" at the scale of an Olympic ceremony are combined with art-historical curation, on top of the vessel of a ticketed show. Choosing classical painting as the material also carries a rationale as a show-business model: the burden of rights clearance is small, and the names have strong pull with visitors. Where Atelier des Lumières "found" an industrial relic in Paris and repurposed it, Frameless started from a box designed beneath London for the purpose of immersion. Rather than borrowing the memory of a relic, it fills with images a space prepared from the outset as an empty vessel.

That vessel is opened to other uses once exhibition hours end. Frameless is operated as an event venue at night and on private hire, and it also takes on commissions to produce immersive content for companies and outside producers. Separate from the four permanent galleries, it holds a variable gallery whose contents can be exchanged, named "Blank Canvas," and there it runs artist residencies and co-productions with outside institutions. It is a mechanism for kindling a room that has been left open with different contents season by season.

A Co-Production with a Living Museum

Into that Blank Canvas gallery, on 21 May 2026, came Stories – Brought to Life, made with the National Portrait Gallery. This is not a one-off project. On 11 December 2024 the National Portrait Gallery announced a long-term partnership with Frameless, revealing that the two would co-produce National Portrait Gallery Unframed, billed as the first full-scale touring immersive exhibition to take a British art institution as its inspiration. The touring show premiered in May 2025 at MediaCity in Greater Manchester, with the film work handled by Cinesite.

Stories – Brought to Life inside Frameless is the permanent, city-sited version of that partnership. From a portrait collection spanning six centuries, it adapts the lives of five figures — Queen Elizabeth II, Nelson Mandela, William Shakespeare, Amy Winehouse and Malala Yousafzai — into an immersive experience of about fifteen minutes. It is included in the standard ticket at no extra charge. Rosie Wilson, who oversees programmes, partnerships and collections at the National Portrait Gallery, has described the aim of the partnership this way.

[The partnership] will enable us to take these stories outside of the Gallery walls and bring them to life in new, innovative ways.

— Museums + Heritage Advisorsource

Here is the occasion on which Frameless steps one pace off the extension of Atelier des Lumières. An immersive venue that adapts public-domain masterpieces makes material of the work of painters who are, so to speak, already dead. In exchange for minimal negotiation with rights holders and minimal clearance, the venue stays an apparatus of adaptation positioned downstream of art history. The partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, by contrast, draws the editorial judgement of a living art institution over to the venue's side, through access to the collection and joint production. Frameless is beginning to move its position from a place that "screens" famous paintings to a body that, together with one museum, "produces" content and "sends it on tour." The room with its frames taken off is becoming not the collection's exit but another entrance.

The Frame and Tenkei

The operation of taking off the frame has a side effect that is easily overlooked. The frame was not mere decoration; it was the boundary of the ma (間), the interval that separates a picture from the world outside it. Erase that boundary and the image runs over the wall onto the floor and falls across the visitor's body. The ma between the one who looks and the image that is looked at is compressed, and before they know it the visitor is standing inside the image. The elation an immersive venue gives its audience comes from this disappearance of the ma itself.

But in a space where the ma has vanished completely, paradoxically, nothing stands out. When the whole field of view is filled equally with image, focus is hard to come by, and so is any distinction between figure and ground. In East Asian landscape painting, it is only because a vast blankness is there — the ma that has been left open — that a single boat or a lone traveller painted in can bring the scenery alive as a tenkei; to kindle meaning, blankness is needed around it.

It is exactly on this point that the co-production with the National Portrait Gallery is interesting. What starts to move is not a landscape and not an abstraction but the face of a single human being. The images of Mandela, of Winehouse, of Shakespeare rise up on the walls of a room that has been left open. It can be read as an attempt to place a focus — that is, a tenkei — of "one person" back inside the logic by which Frameless takes off the frame and fills the space with image. If the immersion of classical painting was achieved by erasing the ma, the immersion of the portrait calls a single point, the figure of a person, back into the ma that has gone.

The room named "Blank Canvas" is suggestive in that sense. A blank canvas: that is, a ma on which nothing has yet been kindled. Into that vessel left open, a different figure or artist is invited season by season as a tenkei, behaves there for a while, and withdraws again. Beyond having taken off the frame and filled the space with image, what Frameless now faces may be the reverse side of an old question: where, in a plane already full, to kindle the figure of a person again. The room without frames erased the boundary the frame used to draw. What remains is the editorial problem of what to make stand out, and where, inside that vanished boundary.

Sources

1. fig.001FRAMELESS — Stories – Brought to Life (official page for the National Portrait Gallery co-production)
2. fig.002FRAMELESS — The Experience (official page for the four galleries)
3. fig.003FRAMELESS — Immersive Event Venue London (official page for venue hire)
4. [4]FRAMELESS — Artist Residencies / Blank Canvas Gallery (official)
5. [5]Museums + Heritage Advisor — National Portrait Gallery makes long-term partnership with immersive experience company(2024-12-11)
6. [6]blooloop — Getting closer to art than ever before at Frameless (technical specification and operating structure)
7. [7]Marble Arch London — Frameless Opens 7 October 2022(2022)
8. [8]FAD Magazine — New 30,000 sq ft digital immersive arts experience to open in London(2022-05-30)

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Frameless Creative (opened 2022; CEO Richard Relton)

LOCATION

London

MODEL

Ticketed show — A permanent ticketed show: immersive classical-painting programmes at its core, with artist residencies and co-productions running alongside in the Blank Canvas gallery

CADENCE

Permanent, year-round; the full experience runs c. 70 minutes, with the Blank Canvas gallery rotating its programme

SPEC

A 30,000 sq ft (c. 2,800 m²) basement, with 50+ Panasonic 3-chip DLP laser projectors, 479 million pixels, 1 million lumens and 158 speakers

SINCE

2022-10

STATUS

Active

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