October 2026
The Wien Museum opens Farbenspiel on 1 October, a history of colour in some 350 garments from its collection. The MAK's century of architectural construction kits comes with building stations, in time for the autumn holidays. The Albertina keeps Picasso and Bacon face to face, and the National Library shows unpublished photographs of Austria's response to the 1956 Hungarian refugees.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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Previously unpublished photographs of Austria's humanitarian response in 1956, when some 200,000 Hungarian refugees crossed the border seeking asylum.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Belvedere 21Past
Chinese artist Miao Ying's first European solo show compares AI training with dog training in installations, videos and paintings, and draws on magic and alchemy.

Belvedere 21Past
Over 150 works the Belvedere acquired in the past decade, arranged experimentally by artist Heimo Zobernig as an inventory and a look at how the museum collects.

MAK – Museum of Applied ArtsPast
Research-led artist Felix Lenz's film and video installations trace the environmental and historical costs of technological image-making, from global infrastructure to Silicon Valley.

Kunst Haus Wien – Museum HundertwasserPast
34 artists, scientists and writers respond to ecological, communal and personal loss, from climate disruption to the AIDS epidemic, around the sculpture Orrery of Interconnected Loss.

Architekturzentrum Wien (Az W)Past
How some 25 Austrian architects used their neutral country's Cold War position to build in newly independent African and Asian states, told through plans, photos and models.

Leopold MuseumPast
First full showing of the Austrian central bank's art collection: New Objectivity, post-Expressionism and postwar abstraction from 1918 to today.

AlbertinaPast
Anniversary show on how Duke Albert and Archduchess Marie Christine built the collection from 1776, highlighting women's role in its founding.

State Hall of the Austrian National Library (Prunksaal)Past
A 1933 music print of a "Mozart" violin concerto actually written by Marius Casadesus in 1931, a hoax undetected until 1977. Chosen by public vote.

Heidi Horten CollectionPast
Cabinet show around Bechtold's iconic concrete Porsche 911, parked in the courtyard's director's space, with photographs, films and serial works on reproduction and documentation.

Upper BelvederePast
Restoration and technical imaging reveal what was painted over in two Lampi works: a mother hidden in a Neoclassical family portrait and a Cupid concealed beside a sleeping Venus.

Jewish Museum Vienna (Jüdisches Museum Wien)Past
In the Dorotheergasse project space: Anja Salomonowitz's film on the sheitel, with a Viennese wigmaker and Orthodox women on why and how they cover their hair.

MAK – Museum of Applied ArtsPast
Ukrainian painter Kateryna Lysovenko, winner of the 2025 Münze Österreich Prize, treats painting as political action, using reduction and absence to counter propaganda.

Kunsthalle WienPast
Fifth edition of the Vienna art-scene survey: 56 artists, 130+ works, many newly commissioned, across both venues (MuseumsQuartier and Karlsplatz).

AlbertinaPast
Travel and expedition photography from the mid-19th century on, with extensive series tracing power, mobility and how the camera captured the world.

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
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
i5 NovBelvedere 21
i5 NovArchitekturzentrum Wien (Az W)
i6 NovAlbertina Modern
i6 NovWien Museum
i12 NovKunst Haus Wien – Museum Hundertwasser
i12 NovAlbertina
i13 NovKunsthalle Wien
i13 NovLeopold Museum
i13 NovBelvedere 21
i14 Novmumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien
i17 NovKunsthistorisches Museum Wien
i19 NovArchitekturzentrum Wien (Az W)Free
i19 NovState Hall of the Austrian National Library (Prunksaal)
i25 NovJewish Museum Vienna (Jüdisches Museum Wien)
i27 NovKunsthalle Wien
i2 DecMAK – Museum of Applied Arts
i2 DecTheatermuseum (Palais Lobkowitz)
i3 DecKunsthalle Wien
i4 DecVienna Secession (Secession)
i4 DecVienna Secession (Secession)
i4 DecVienna Secession (Secession)
i5 Decmumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien
i14 DecTechnisches Museum Wien (Vienna Technical Museum)
i16 DecMAK – Museum of Applied Arts
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.