German-Italian collector, publisher and patron Egidio Marzona has died at the age of 81. According to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, or SPK), his vast collection helped define the study and presentation of avant-garde art in the 20th century. He died on Sunday in Berlin.
Unlike many collectors of his generation, Malzona did not regard the archive as secondary material but rather as central to the work itself, collecting not just paintings and objects but also paper records of ideas—letters, diagrams, exhibition plans—that map how the avant-garde was thought about, circulated, and sustained. His focus on art and its ephemera focuses on movements from the interwar period, such as Dada and Bauhaus, to postwar movements such as Fluxus, Conceptual Art, and Arte Povera. Since then, Malzona’s collection has served as the basis for museums and scholars to understand these different artistic movements.
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His commitment to public participation was equally decisive. Beginning in the early 2000s, Malzona transferred the majority of its collection to German institutions, which included the SPK’s existing collection of more than 600 artworks and tens of thousands of archival materials scattered among Berlin museums and libraries, with plans for further integration in the upcoming Berlin Museum of Modern Art.
In later years, he continued to expand and refine these gifts, including donating rare artist books from the 1960s, including works by figures such as Carl Andre, Bruce Nauman, and Lawrence Weiner, that are rarely found in public collections.
Malzona also pursued more experimental forms of sponsorship. In 2018, his foundation acquired a long-abandoned castle in eastern Germany with plans to transform it into dieDAS Design Akademie Saaleck, a design school that would provide residencies and bring together international practitioners in architecture, craft, and design, an effort as much to shape the creative networks of the future as to preserve those of the past.
Tatjana Sprick, director of projects and development at dieDAS, recounted her experience developing dieDAS with Marzona on Instagram, saying: “What started as a collaboration quickly became something more meaningful: Egidio His vision, generosity and deep belief in the importance of art, design and education have shaped not only this project but my own thinking. He cares deeply about supporting young designers, craftsmen, architects and artists and is committed to creating spaces where they can feel free to grow. Living with him has been one of the greatest privileges of my career.”
Egidio Marzona was born in 1944 in Bielefeld, Germany. His interest in collecting began around the late 1960s. His earliest interest was in conceptual art, and he was as interested in the artistic process as in the finished product. In the 1970s he founded a short-lived gallery in Bielefeld, but soon turned his attention to publishing, founding Edition Marzona, which published books on topics such as the Bauhaus and photography.
But ultimately, his real calling was institutional sponsorship. His achievement lies not just in the scale of what he collected, but in his redefinition of the collection itself as a form of intellectual infrastructure, patiently constructed and then handed over to the public. This legacy is most evident in Berlin through his donations to the SPK, where he donated a collection of 1.5 million objects to the Free State of Saxony, and in Dresden. This gift culminates in the opening of the Avant-Garde Art Archive in Dresden in 2024, a rare attempt to preserve archival records of the avant-garde on an institutional scale. For his contribution to the German capital’s art scene, he was awarded the Berlin State Order of Merit in 2014.
“Egidio Marzona dedicated his life to art,” SPK chairman Marion Ackermann said in a statement. “He was a passionate and tireless collector of 20th-century avant-garde art, seeking to capture artistic and intellectual movements throughout the century. His collection was not limited to artworks, but extended to evidence of the entire artistic creative process. Berlin and Dresden owe him a great debt, as he gradually transferred his collections to their respective museums, where they acted like batteries, constantly generating new narratives and contexts.”
