September 2026
September 2026 at a glance: 14 exhibitions opened, 11 closed, and 30 more were on view across the city.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MAK – Museum of Applied ArtsPast
Christoph Schlingensief's first solo show in Austria, centred on his installation Church of Fear, spans the political actions and films that broke down lines between art, theatre and politics.

Upper BelvederePast
Botanist-turned-artist herman de vries fills the Baroque Carlone Hall with a fragrant ellipse of purple lavender flowers laid out on the floor.

Natural History Museum Vienna (Naturhistorisches Museum Wien)Past
Photographer Gregor Sailer asks how we will grow food tomorrow, contrasting labour-intensive, diverse agrosystems with AI-controlled automated farming. Hall 21, 2nd floor.

Jewish Museum Vienna (Jüdisches Museum Wien)Past
At Museum Judenplatz: the power and powerlessness of forgetting, from rabbinical excommunication to Austria's post-1945 amnesia, with Brigitte Kowanz and William Utermohlen.

MAK – Museum of Applied ArtsPast
Posters from seven decades of the Wiener Festwochen, drawn from the MAK and Wienbibliothek, chart the festival's evolution and its shifting design languages.

Kunsthistorisches Museum WienPast
Showcase EXTRA #8: Roman marble portraits of women, like Julia Titi, beside coin portraits, tracing centuries of reworking plus two never-before-shown heads.

AlbertinaPast
Around 50 works by Helga Philipp (1939-2002), a leading figure of Austrian concrete and op art, spanning painting, drawing, prints and kinetic objects.

Wien MuseumFreePast
Fifty years after the 1976 occupation of a former slaughterhouse, a free show goes behind the scenes of the Arena, the self-run venue that became home to Vienna's alternative scene.

MAK – Museum of Applied ArtsPast
Some 500 pieces pair 120 years of Van Cleef & Arpels high jewellery with rarely seen MAK treasures in a labyrinth of six themes, from wanderlust to nature.

Albertina ModernPast
KAWS's cartoon-born characters, uniting pop, commercial and public art, shown in dialogue with contemporary artists to probe the line between comics and fine art.

Wien MuseumPast
The Peschka bequest reveals Egon Schiele's family life: paintings, letters, photos, his studio furniture and his own glass cabinet of mementos, via his sister Gerti and painter Anton Peschka.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.

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.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.