What's on in Vienna

Belvedere 21

Artists from the feminist avant-garde to today tackle social, gender and ecological issues, building on the landmark 1985 show Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn.

Architekturzentrum Wien (Az W)

KOSMOS architects look at the temporary structures that keep cities running, from construction sites to maintenance work, and what they reveal about efficiency and adaptability.

Albertina Modern

Retrospective marking Franz West's 80th birthday, centred on his Adaptives: sculptures meant to be worn and handled that blurred art and everyday life.

Wien Museum

How his home city shaped Franz West, focused on his formative years from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Opens alongside a parallel West show at the Albertina Modern.

Kunst Haus Wien – Museum Hundertwasser

Solo show in the Project Room Garage on the sea as a link between islands, migration and ecological crisis. It opens the Aqua cycle on water in motion.

Albertina

Tribute to Arnulf Rainer (1929-2025), the uncompromising Austrian innovator whose radical 1950s overpaintings pushed painting to its limits.

Kunsthalle Wien

Tiffany Sia's first Austrian solo show: a new film on the Cold War legacy of Taiwan's Kinmen Islands, bunkers, beaches and radio. At MuseumsQuartier.

Leopold Museum

Over 100 photographs of the sober, clear New Objectivity, from Renger-Patzsch, Sander and Blossfeldt to Austrians like Trude Fleischmann.

Belvedere 21

The sixth edition of the Civa biennial: five international artists push back against speed and optimisation, with talks, film screenings and live performances.

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien

Allan Kaprow's 1963 participatory piece, in which visitors rearrange furniture, anchors a show on collective action and the museum as a temporary studio.

MAK – Museum of Applied Arts

Posters from two decades of Vienna Design Week, honouring the designers who shaped the festival's look each autumn. In the MAK Poster Forum.

State Hall of the Austrian National Library (Prunksaal)

Love across 2,000 years in the library's collections, from ancient creation myths and medieval love songs to Mozart, Schubert, Goethe and Bachmann.

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien

The Georgian artist's first solo museum show uses the "figure of the child" to rethink first encounters with art, drawing in movement, touch and works by Picasso, Goldin and Paik.

Jewish Museum Vienna (Jüdisches Museum Wien)

At Dorotheergasse: Israeli artist Eran Shakine's humorous large oil-pastel works follow three top-hatted men, one of each faith, exploring what the monotheistic religions share.

Vienna Secession (Secession)

Sound pioneer Bernhard Leitner shows new and earlier immersive sound installations, including a water-based sound space and a Sound Couch you feel through your body.

Vienna Secession (Secession)

Lap-See Lam's new glass sculptures, sound and spatial objects on diaspora and family history, with bamboo-like glass forms and a soundscape tied to Hong Kong.

Vienna Secession (Secession)

Sheets naming enslaved people who escaped, each with date, place and a painted flower, fill the walls as Ellis's voice reads the names aloud.

MAK – Museum of Applied Arts

Presented with Wien Modern, Annea Lockwood's multichannel sound installation follows the Danube from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, weaving river sounds with the voices of people who live by it.

MAK – Museum of Applied Arts

A survey of Viennese ceramist Vally Wieselthier (1895-1945), whose expressive ceramic sculpture spanned Europe and America, with many works from her US estate shown for the first time.

Lower Belvedere

Retrospective of Polish avant-garde artist Erna Rosenstein (1913–2004): some eighty paintings, drawings, assemblages and poems on trauma, memory and resilience.

Albertina Modern

Op Art pioneers Victor Vasarely and Marc Adrian side by side: geometric grids and optical effects designed to set the viewer's eyes in motion.

Natural History Museum Vienna (Naturhistorisches Museum Wien)

Jürgen Merz's before-and-after photographs retrace 19th-century glacier views across the Alps, showing how fast the ice is retreating. Hallway, level 1.

State Hall of the Austrian National Library (Prunksaal)

Erich Lessing's contact sheet from Budapest on 28 October 1956, when the Hungarian Uprising briefly seemed won. Chosen by public vote, shown within Bridge of Humanity.

State Hall of the Austrian National Library (Prunksaal)

Previously unpublished photographs of Austria's humanitarian response in 1956, when some 200,000 Hungarian refugees crossed the border seeking asylum.

Albertina

German comedy legend Otto Waalkes as painter, sending his Ottifants roaming through art history in dialogue with the Albertina's collection.

Leopold Museum

Painter Herbert Boeckl and sculptor Hans Josephsohn, who never met, in dialogue: shared ideas of the body, material and the search for form.

Technisches Museum Wien (Vienna Technical Museum)

Eight energy-storage innovations from VERBUND and Austrian start-ups and researchers, from salt-water and oxygen-ion batteries to green hydrogen and smart EV charging, plus an interactive grid game.

MAK – Museum of Applied Arts

Thomas Demand turns historic theatre set models, from the Baroque to the early 20th century, into a new photographic series with large wall installations and custom lighting.

Wien MuseumFree

People with Down syndrome tell their own stories about everyday life, school and work, friendships, hobbies and dreams.

Weltmuseum Wien

Pop-up show pairing Guido Boggiani's c.1900 photographs and collection with the voices of today's Ishír (Chamacoco) people of Paraguay.

Lower Belvedere

Solo show of Erika Giovanna Klien (1900–1957), leading figure of Viennese Kineticism: birds in flight, dancing bodies, rotating machines and her later New York work.

Albertina

Major face-off between the 20th century's two great figurative painters, Picasso and Bacon, and their savage reinventions of the human body.

Technisches Museum Wien (Vienna Technical Museum)

A five-level special exhibition on the circular economy: how food, clothing, housing and leisure could be rethought from a product's start, with projects like algae-based clothing.

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien

A five-act show across five levels built around Kate Millett's 1972 installation, setting some 400 collection works, loans and commissions around the act of looking.

Kunst Haus Wien – Museum Hundertwasser

Main show of the Klima Biennale Wien: 13 international artists, including Cecilia Vicuña and Kapwani Kiwanga, use sculpture, installation, photography and video to explore seeds, loss and regeneration.

Albertina

The first show devoted to the women artists in the Albertina's collection, from medieval convent woodcuts to early feminist work of the 1970s.

Albertina

Fever-dream landscapes by US painter Shara Hughes: giant flowers, enchanted forests and blazing sunsets in fauvist, expressionist colour.

Heidi Horten Collection

First large-scale survey of the Austrian artist-philosopher: sculptures, paintings, drawings, films and a site-specific installation on the earth as bearer of history, life and memory.

MAK – Museum of Applied Arts

About 150 building kits from a century of toy-making, from wood and metal to Galalith and Lego, with eight hands-on stations where visitors can play and build.

Jewish Museum Vienna (Jüdisches Museum Wien)

In the Dorotheergasse Project Space: Nives Widauer's installation on Vienna-raised harpist Steffy Goldner, projected onto a historic harp case.

Wien Museum

A cultural history of colour told through around 350 garments from the Wien Museum's fashion collection, exploring colour as a symbol of status, emotion and identity.

Weltmuseum Wien

A KHM show on the unsolved murder behind an octagonal tomb in Ephesus, set among Cleopatra, Caesar, Mark Antony and Augustus. In the Neue Hofburg.

Upper Belvedere

Asta Gröting's video installation sends deformed everyday objects floating in slow motion through a deep blue summer sky, shown in the Upper Belvedere's Carlone Hall.

Jewish Museum Vienna (Jüdisches Museum Wien)

At Museum Judenplatz: how Vienna stripped its Jews of their rights after 1938 and drove them out, and the lives of those who fled.

Sigmund Freud Museum

The Freud family's last months in Nazi Vienna: the dispossession of Sigmund and Alexander Freud and the murder of their four sisters, told through newly acquired documents.

Weltmuseum WienFree

A participatory room where communities from across Vienna reflect on the world and the museum, with three invited artists. Free admission.

Heidi Horten Collection

Cabinet show on the women's shoe as fetish, projection surface and site of feminist critique: Andy Warhol's shoe prints alongside Birgit Jürgenssen, Gudrun Kampl and Sylvie Fleury.

Weltmuseum Wien

Photos of c.1900 arms dealers, collection objects and contemporary art trace the global gun trade and challenge colonial myths of 'primitive' weapons.

Natural History Museum Vienna (Naturhistorisches Museum Wien)

At the NHM's Narrenturm site (Spitalgasse 2, 1090), a show on electropathology: Vienna's pioneering research, electricity's effects on the body, first aid and prevention.

Weltmuseum Wien

Objects from the Weltmuseum's stores that have rarely, if ever, been on public display, with the stories of where they came from and what they meant.

Natural History Museum Vienna (Naturhistorisches Museum Wien)

The anniversary show traces how a 30,000-object imperial collection grew into 30 million, and looks critically at the darker sides of collecting and exploration.

Natural History Museum Vienna (Naturhistorisches Museum Wien)

Genetics and archaeology reveal family ties in two early medieval burial grounds near Vienna, retelling the Migration Period through ordinary people's lives. Hall 21.

Dom Museum Wien

The close yet ambivalent bond between animals and humans, from the Middle Ages to today, with works by Goya, Ensor, Maria Lassnig, VALIE EXPORT and Graciela Iturbide.

Technisches Museum Wien (Vienna Technical Museum)

Fibre, function, fashion: a special exhibition taking clothing textiles apart into fibres, yarns and fabrics, from 19th-century objects to today's overproduction and textile waste.

Sigmund Freud Museum

A monumental mural triptych made for the Showroom Berggasse 19, picturing inner worlds, with Jane McAdam Freud's wire-mesh egg in an armchair at its centre.