A villa from the Wilhelminian period
The Kebbel villa was commissioned in 1884 by the then director of the adjacent ironworks - now Fronberg Guss - Josef Eigner, and built by master builder and architect Johann Urban from 1886 to 1888 in the style of a Gründerzeit building. Eigner died a year before completion, which is why the estate owner Andreas Kebbel moved into the residential building in his place. In the post-war period, the Kebbel family took in homeless people. They themselves lived in the villa until the death of Adolf Kebbel, the son of the first owner, from whose community of heirs the municipality of Fronberg bought the building in 1966. When the district of Fronberg was incorporated into the municipality on 1 June 1972, the town of Schwandorf acquired the property and, after several temporary uses, decided to build an artists' residence. From 1981 onwards, the building, which had been a listed building since 1974, was renovated and opened in the summer of 1988 as the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus (Upper Palatinate Artists' House), supported by the city of Schwandorf.
At the end of the 1980s, international artist exchanges began with the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in the USA, a partner house that still exists today. In 1994, the Künstlerhaus became a member of the international network Res Artis and built the International Künstlerhaus, a living and working space for guest artists, over the next few years.
With its changing exhibitions of contemporary art, lectures, readings and concerts, as well as its long-established exchange programme, the Künstlerhaus has since become an integral part of the regional and international artistic scene.
