Dresden blockhouse converted for Archive of the Avant-Garde

After almost four years of construction, the baroque Dresden Blockhaus has been completely renovated and converted into the home of a private art archive. It will be ceremoniously handed over to the Dresden State Art Collections on September 7, becoming the "Archive of the Avant-Garde - Egidio Marzona," the Ministry of Finance announced on Thursday. The Free State invested around 29 million euros in the modern building, which also houses a research platform and space for exhibitions.

Name giver and benefactor Marzona had donated around 1.5 million objects of his art collection to the museum network in 2016 and transferred another 200,000 in 2018. Behind the facade of the gutted 18th-century building on the banks of the Elbe in Neustadt, a modern space for presentation, research and preservation was created - including a "floating" concrete cube.

The German-Italian art collector Marzona has compiled the collection since the 1960s. It includes manifestos, correspondence, posters, films, artists' books, catalogs and exemplary artworks and design objects by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Mies van der Rohe, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Niki de Saint Phalle, Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys.