Saxony has another temple of art. The Archive of the Avant-Garde - Egidio Marzona (ADA) opens this Sunday as a new exhibition, research and debate venue of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD) after six years of renovating a historic building. "This is a great moment here," said SKD Director General Marion Ackermann on Thursday. The ADA is not just an archive, not just a museum, "but a new kind of institution in between, an example of how museums can also be thought of".
Ackermann thanked the namesake Egidio Marzona for the donation of his art collection of almost 1.5 million objects in 2016. "It is the largest gain that the SKD has ever been able to absorb in one go." And the Free State has made "such a fantastic and courageous project" possible. Around 29 million euros were invested to turn the 18th century log cabin into a temple of art.
A modern multifunctional space with a seemingly floating concrete cube, which offers a research platform and space for exhibitions, has been created inside the listed building, which has been gutted down to the baroque outer shell. The exhibition "Archive of Dreams. A Surrealist Impulse" with around 300 works of art is dedicated to the Surrealists and their influence on other avant-garde movements such as Dada, Cobra, Fluxus and Pop Art.
