Exhibitions in Vienna

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Previously unpublished photographs of Austria's humanitarian response in 1956, when some 200,000 Hungarian refugees crossed the border seeking asylum.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

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.

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.

Kunsthalle Wien

Joint show of the 2026 prize winners, recent graduates of Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts and University of Applied Arts. At Karlsplatz.

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.

State Hall of the Austrian National Library (Prunksaal)

Letters, gifts and portraits reveal the household of Emperor Francis II/I and Empress Maria Teresa behind the idyll, under dynastic pressure and the threat of war.

Vienna Secession (Secession)

Vienna-based Japanese artist Yoshinori Niwa stages participatory, performance-based works that probe power, participation and society.

Vienna Secession (Secession)

LA-based painter Beaux Mendes questions landscape painting's ties to power and colonialism in paintings and sculptures made during a Vienna residency.

Albertina

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

Leopold Museum

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

Vienna Secession (Secession)

Polish artist Iza Tarasewicz builds large modular installations from salvaged materials, drawing on philosophy, quantum physics and chaos theory.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Technisches Museum Wien (Vienna Technical Museum)

Diaries, photographs and maps from Alois Negrelli's estate show Austria's part in building the Suez Canal and in colonial networks. Shown inside Material Worlds.

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.

Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien

Rough, asymmetrical tea-ceremony ceramics from Bizen, Hagi and Shigaraki, made by generations of master-potter families, from the Heinz Slunecko collection.

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

The 21st edition of the best posters from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, from experimental author graphics to corporate design. In the MAK Plakat Forum.

Theatermuseum (Palais Lobkowitz)

A KHM show at Palais Lobkowitz built around a Portrait of an Old Man newly attributed to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, with about ten international loans.

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.

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.

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.

Albertina

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

MAK – Museum of Applied Arts

Set designer Anna Viebrock stages MAK collection objects from 1918-1938 as a domestic experiment, exploring how housing and interiors reshaped Vienna after World War I.

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.

Kunsthalle Wien

Magali Reus's first Austrian solo show: vessel-like sculptures mixing casting, forging, wicker and embroidery with machine processes. At MuseumsQuartier.

Jewish Museum Vienna (Jüdisches Museum Wien)

At Dorotheergasse: how 19th-century Viennese Jewish scholars and adventurers shaped Oriental and Islamic studies while searching for their own origins.

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien

An immersive film and sound project that tunes into the planet's inaudible voices, from infrasound and seismic resonance to animal and plant communication.

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.