Fondazione d'arte Erich Lindenberg

A villa in Porza for the work of Erich Lindenberg, since 2008

Art foundation and museum; Museo Villa Pia, Porza (Lugano)

MUSEUMS

Museo Villa Pia
Via Cantonale 24, 6948 Porza
Open Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 11 am–5 pm

The Fondazione d'arte Erich Lindenberg, founded in 2008 by the painter Mareen Koch, preserves and promotes the work of the German painter Erich Lindenberg (1938–2006). Since 2012 it has shown it in Porza, in the Museo Villa Pia, together with exhibitions of contemporary artists.

Images: Fondazione d'arte Erich Lindenberg

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Pink villa façade with green shutters, wisteria, a painted coat of arms and a stone fountain on a lawn

The façade of Villa Pia in Porza, with the painted coat of arms and the garden fountain

The Foundation

Erich Lindenberg (Gronau, Westphalia, 1938 – Berlin, 2006) was a German painter. After an apprenticeship as a textile designer he studied at the Folkwangschule in Essen and, from 1962 to 1968, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. For almost forty years he worked as a draughtsman of archaeological finds for the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments, and from 1994 he taught life drawing at the Munich Academy. In September 2006 he died suddenly in his new studio in Kreuzberg, Berlin. His work, divided between Munich and Berlin, was at risk of being scattered. Mareen Koch, a painter and his fellow student at the Academy, had promised him when they were young that she would look after his estate: in agreement with the artist's brother, the musician Udo Lindenberg, in May 2008 she created the Fondazione d'arte Erich Lindenberg, which preserves the works, studies them and presents them to the public.

The Museo Villa Pia

The Foundation turned Villa Pia, a patrician villa in Porza above Lugano, with a coat of arms painted on the façade and a garden with a fountain overlooking the hills, into a museum. The museum opened in April 2012 with a Lindenberg retrospective and an exhibition by the Ticino photographer Roberto Pellegrini: it was the first time the German artist's work had been shown in Ticino. The collection, made up of oils on canvas, pastels, drawings, watercolours and photographs, is shown in rotation. Alongside Lindenberg, Villa Pia hosts temporary exhibitions of contemporary artists, mostly from the region, as well as meetings, talks, films, book presentations and concerts.

The painting of Erich Lindenberg

The Foundation divides the work into four groups: the Quadri d'ombre (Shadow Paintings), which paint form a moment before it disappears; the Kleine Raumbilder (Small Spatial Paintings), small and almost simple, where space is made of colour; the Figures, men lying, sitting and standing, woven from oil paint, transparent varnishes and pastels; the Still Lifes, stripped-down objects that refuse to be deciphered. During his lifetime Lindenberg exhibited, among other places, at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich (1976), the Kunsthalle in Kiel (1980 and 1989), the Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst in Munich (1985) and the Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen, with the exhibition Vom Verschwinden des Menschen (1992).

The exhibitions

Since 2012 Villa Pia has presented some twenty exhibitions of artists in dialogue with Lindenberg's work. Among the most recent: Luciano Rigolini, Fotografica (2024–2025), Aoi Huber Kono, Il sensore nascosto (2025), Manuela Bieri, Tassonomie (2025–2026), Margherita Turewicz Lafranchi, Pramateria, and Carla Ferriroli, Sedimenti (2026). From 29 November 2026 to 5 September 2027, on the twentieth anniversary of the artist's death, the exhibition Tributo a Erich Lindenberg sets a biographical section alongside works by six contemporary artists: Luciano Rigolini, Adriana Beretta, Susanna Baumgartner, Franco Clivio, Aoi Huber Kono and Adriano Pitschen.

The façade of Villa Pia in Porza, with the painted coat of arms and the garden fountain