Exhibitions

The permanent exhibition at the Architekturzentrum Wien provides insights into the most extensive and comprehensive collection on Austrian architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries. At the centre is the investigation of key exponents, including well-known and less well-known objects. Seven Hot Questions bring Cold Storage to life.

The Architekturzentrum Wien is the only museum in Austria devoted exclusively to architecture. As the Az W Collection has expanded over the last 17 years and consists of over 100 architects’ archives as well as extensive collections of individual projects, a large number of objects are being shown for the first time in the Permanent Exhibition: ‘Hot Questions — Cold Storage’. Selected models, drawings, furniture, fabrics, documents and films develop new threads in seven thematic episodes. Each episode is preceded by one of today’s burning issues, a Hot Question that brings Cold Storage to life.

The nation’s building activity with all of its cultural, social, economic and technical ramifications is made strikingly visible. The contents covered range from the special significance of Red Vienna to architectural pedagogical experiments in the wake of the 1968 movement or architectural revolts in Vorarlberg, to historical and current examples of environmental rethinking. The exhibition also engages with the ideological instrumentalisation of architecture and spatial planning and the active collaboration of architects in authoritarian systems, as well as their resistance. At the same time, the exhibition challenges deficits in the canon of Austrian architectural history, for instance from a perspective of gender equality. New players are featured, light is shed on previously little known sources and the key focus is on multiple perspectives instead of on a national historical narrative. This diversity is also reflected in the exhibition design. The sheer variety of the exponents and their display makes a visit to the exhibition a sensual and an atmospheric experience.

Concept: Angelika Fitz, Monika Platzer
Curator: Monika Platzer
Curatorial Assistance: Sonja Pisarik, Iris Ranzinger, Katrin Stingl
Production: Andreas Kurz
Finances und conversion: Karin Lux
Assistance: Barbara Kapsammer
Exhibition design: tracing spaces / Michael Hieslmair, Michael Zinganel ; seite zwei / Christoph Schörkhuber, Stefanie Wurnitsch

Adolf Krischanitz, Otto Steidle, Herzog & de Meuron: Wohnsiedlung Pilotengasse, Wien 22, 1987–1992, Modell Gesamtanlage Bauteil Krischanitz

This exhibition focuses on the transformative years of mumok under the directorship of Dieter Ronte (1979–1989). Exemplary insights into the heterogeneity of the collection expansions are juxtaposed with the culturalpolitical parameters and programmatic decisions of this decade.

“Never Final”—a concept articulated by Hertha Firnberg—continues to define mumok as a dynamic place of change to this day. This idea is brought to life in the exhibition through an open format featuring interactive furniture and dialogue spaces, presenting the museum as a platform for collective research, learning, and reflection.

Curated by Marie-Therese Hochwartner and Dieter Ronte

Maria Lassnig. Fliegen lernen / Learning to Fly, 1976. 177 x 127 cm. Tempera auf Leinwand / Tempera on canvas. mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, erworben / acquired in 1980. © Maria Lassnig Stiftung

Beyond mere chronology and style histories, the exhibition The World of Tomorrow Will Have Been Another Present traces narratives in the mumok collection of classical modernism that resonate to the present day.

The departure point is a form of speculation firmly anchored in temporality—a temporality with circular tendencies. “Speculation,” says cultural scientist Karin Harrasser, “is not about the extrapolation of the present or betting on probable processes; it has to do with a retroactive allegiance, an operation in Future II: speculative thinking has to measure up with the possibilities that it will have brought into being.”*

Who, if not the artists from a collection of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries like that of the mumok, no matter when they may have been active, would understand more about this way of thinking in loops, backward and forward at the same time, about meandering through history?

The exhibition consists of five large-scale installations by Nikita Kadan, Barbara Kapusta, Frida Orupabo, Lisl Ponger, and Anita Witek, which enter into a dialogue with works of classical modernism they have selected from the mumok collection. As their own artworks are also part of the collection, these contemporaries continue to write the history of the museum and the history of contemporary art. In the exhibition, urgent questions of our time are mirrored in historical manifestations of themselves, which, in turn, point from an already past present to a still indefinite future.

With works by Herbert Bayer, Hans Bellmer, Karl Blossfeldt, Louise Bourgeois, Constantin Brâncuși, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Henri Florence, Alberto Giacometti, Juan Gris, George Grosz, Raul Hausmann, Johannes Itten, Friedrich Kiesler, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fernand Léger, René Magritte, Alicia Penalba, Antoine Pevsner, Man Ray, Germaine Richier, Alexander Michailowitsch Rodtschenko, Oskar Schlemmer, Kurt Schwitters, Victor Servranckx, Nicola Vučo, Fritz Wotruba and many more

Curated by Franz Thalmair in collaboration with Nikita Kadan, Barbara Kapusta, Frida Orupabo, Lisl Ponger, and Anita Witek

* Karin Harrasser, “As reality creates itself, unforeseeable and new, its image reflects behind it into the indefinite past.” in: Kunstraum Lakeside — Recherche | Research, ed. Franz Thalmair, trans. Peter Blakeney and Christine Schöffler (Vienna: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2019), p. 17.

Opening: May 22, 2025, 7 pm

Hans Bellmer, La Bouche / The Mouth, 1935. 16 x 16 cm. Silberbromidabzug, koloriert / Silver-bromide print, colored mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, erworben / acquired in 1978 © Bildrecht, Wien 2025

Born in Linz in 1971, Tobias Pils is among the most exciting painters working today. Employing a heavily reduced color palette, he creates paintings and drawings that weave abstract and representational elements into associative pictorial worlds. What in terms of subject matter can be interpreted as an investigation of both elementary and personal themes like birth and death or becoming and passing, also negotiates central questions in painting at large. For in Pils’ visual cosmos, one painterly mark leads to the next, one image to another, as if painting were constantly staging its own death and rebirth.

Tobias Pils lives and works in Vienna.

Curated by Manuela Ammer

Tobias Pils, Geist, 2024. Öl auf Leinwand / oil on canvas. 150 x 180 cm Courtesy the artist, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich/Vienna, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne Photo: Jorit Aust © Tobias Pils

The book as an artistic medium plays a central role in the work of Louise Bourgeois, Heinz Gappmayr, Sol Lewitt, Rosemarie Trockel, as well as many contemporary young artists in the Austrian and international scene.

Books are used as instruments to design poetic visions and to expand concept art. The artists’ books in this exhibition initiate dialogues about gender roles and socio-political questions. At the same time, books are a form of cultural memory and commemoration. Young artists experiment with the medium of the book and transcend traditional boundaries of image, text, and material–against the backdrop of the digital world. In the exhibition, visitors can take different positions to leaf through and read books with the help of a specially developed, expansive display.

Heinz Frank, Kinderbuch für Architekten, 1993. © MAK

Within the format “Viewing the Collection & An Insert by…”, installations and groups of works are presented alongside highlights from the Painting Gallery’s collection. These inserts are conceived as interventions by contemporary artists within the temporarily arranged display of the collection. The insert by the Belgian artist Ana Torfs constitutes the third intervention in this series.
 

Under the title The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves, Torfs presents for the first time a new cycle of 28 Jacquard tapestries. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the artist read Virgil’s Aeneid and, while walking and collecting autumn leaves, thought of the Sibyl of Cumae, who wrote her prophecies on leaves. Torfs pressed the collected foliage between the pages of international daily newspapers, photographed these arrangements, and later had them woven as large-scale tapestries, complemented by personal, verse-like textual fragments.
 

The result is a fragmentary tableau reflecting both the state of the contemporary world and the thoughts of an individual. The lyrical textile fabric lends a sense of permanence to the fleeting events of everyday life while pointing to a historically significant present whose future consequences remain uncertain. Like the Sibyl’s leaves scattered by the wind, today’s news and interpretations increasingly appear enigmatic.

Ausstellungsansicht © Kunstsammlungen der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Foto: Iris Ranzinger

Work shapes the greater part of human life. It structures everyday routines, time, and social relationships, while also determining material security and social participation. In a present marked by economic crises, global inequality, and profound transformations of the working world, engagement with the topic of work has gained new urgency. Platform labor, automation, artificial intelligence, migration, the care crisis, and social precarity are challenging established ideas and certainties.
 
The exhibition Alles in Arbeit at the Dom Museum Wien creates a space in which diverse perspectives and artistic approaches come together. At its core is the human struggle with wage labor—its necessity, meaning, burden, and potential for shaping life. At the same time, the works on view question and expand conventional definitions of work by addressing invisible, unpaid, or marginalized forms of labor, including care and domestic work, artistic production, protest, and procrastination.

See Red Women’s Workshop, A Woman’s Work Is Never Done, 1974. © See Red Women’s Workshop.

BLACK JEWS, WHITE JEWS?

What skin colours do Jewish people have – and what colours are attributed to them, and how do they perceive themselves?

The exhibition ‘Black Jews, White Jews?’ explores these questions and presents historical and contemporary examples of how Jews are perceived by others and how they perceive themselves. It examines the topic of Jewish identity in the context of the tension between self-definition, anti-Semitism and racism.
The various answers reinforce the topicality and urgency of this exhibition.

“The Case Freud. Documents of Injustice” sheds light on the final months of the Freud family in Nazi Vienna and recounts the events in the years that followed. The systematic dispossession of Sigmund Freud and his brother Alexander Freud is reconstructed in detail. New findings deepen our understanding of the fate and murder of their four sisters—Rosa Freud, Maria Freud, Adolfine Freud, and Pauline Freud—by the Nazi regime.

Unpublished (Perpetrator) Documents
The Sigmund Freud Museum recently succeeded in acquiring previously unknown documents. They come from the estate of the Nazi-appointed “provisional administrator” of the International Psychoanalytic Publishing House, which was owned by Sigmund and Anna Freud.
These documents now form the central element of the exhibition. Viewed together with hundreds of original files, business letters, and lists from the financial administrator responsible for
 

Alexander Freud and the four sisters, they shed light on the legal and financial mechanisms behind the Nazi crimes.
The records also reveal another act of perfidy: the founder of psychoanalysis was able to ship the entire furnishings of his home at Berggasse 19—including his antiquities collection—to London. As a result, his emigration appeared privileged in the eyes of the international public. Behind the scenes, however, the Nazis seized nearly all of his financial resources through the intermediary of the International Psychoanalytic Publishing House; in doing so, his son Martin Freud, the publishing house’s managing director, was placed under massive pressure.
Alexander Freud was the owner of the Allgemeiner Tarif‑Anzeiger. As a freight expert he was internationally recognized and had achieved greater wealth than his more famous brother. He was able to save his life and that of his wife only by surrendering all of his possessions. Penniless, they left Vienna, fled via Zurich to London, and eventually continued on to Canada.
Four of Freud’s five sisters were living in Vienna in 1938—no escape could be arranged for them. They were forced out of their homes, placed in a “collective apartment,” robbed, deported, and murdered in 1942.

Plakat. Der Fall Freud. Dokumente des Unrechts. Simund Freud Museum

The Kunsthalle Wien presents a major institutional survey of Richard Hawkins for the first time in Austria and his first such exhibition in over a decade. The exhibition brings together more than 100 works from nine series produced over the past three decades, including paintings, collages, sculptures, and videos.

Hawkins’s practice is grounded in desire and the pleasure of looking and is shaped by a highly referential collage-based approach that weaves together art history, literature, theater, and popular culture. The exhibition traces his often obsessive engagement with subjects such as ancient sculpture, subcultures, artists’ biographies, and internet memes. It spans early image collages, ceramic works, and acrylic paintings through to AI-processed videos described as “queer exorcisms.” Complementing these works, Hawkins uses large-scale wallpapers made from enlarged images to layer and juxtapose different phases of his practice.

Key bodies of work include a dark reimagining of the biblical story of Salome; studies of artists such as Tatsumi Hijikata, Antonin Artaud, and Forrest Bess; and more recent, vividly colored paintings of Hollywood stars. The latter combine paparazzi photographs with art-historical references, notably to Pierre Bonnard.

Richard Hawkins: Potentialities is organized in cooperation with the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover, where the exhibition will be shown from late April 2026.

Installation view Richard Hawkins: Potentialities, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

From 2 December 2025, the Kunsthistorisches Museum will present the special exhibition Chinese Art from the Forbidden City in the Gold Cabinet of the Kunstkammer. Curated jointly by the Palace Museum and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the exhibition brings together 76 outstanding masterpieces that offer insight into the aesthetics of Chinese court life in the eighteenth century. Through artistic expressions of power, culture, and ideals of life, the exhibition highlights both parallels and differences between East and West in comparable historical periods.
 

Most of the works on view—including imperial jade carvings and precious porcelain objects—will be shown in Europe for the first time. At the heart of the exhibition is a finely crafted ruyi scepter made of gilded bronze with triple jade inlay, exemplifying the extraordinary virtuosity of Chinese filigree work while symbolizing “good fortune and blessing.” Under this guiding motif, the exhibition also marks the 55th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Austria in 2026.
 

Centered on the theme Harmony in Diversity, the exhibition presents the virtuosity of eighteenth-century Chinese court art and craftsmanship. Objects made from precious materials such as jade, porcelain, lacquer, enamel, and clocks illustrate the aesthetic philosophy of the imperial court, where scholarly art, decorative objects, and functional works served to convey ideals and values through material form.

Teekanne mit kaiserlichem Gedicht Teapot with Imperial Poem Height: 12.7 cm; diameter: 6.3 cm (rim), 7 cm (base) © The Palace Museum

Claudia Pagès Rabal is a visual artist, performer, and writer. With the means of language, movement and music, their own body and other choreographed bodies, the artist explores topics such as social hierarchies, a sense of belonging, queer body economies, and desire.

At mumok, Claudia Pagès Rabal will present a new commissioned work in collaboration with Chisenhale Gallery in London and developed in collaboration with Tractora Koop in Bilbao. Continuing their research into the Iberian Peninsula during the al-Andalus era—the Arabic name for lands under Muslim rule between 711 and 1492—Pagès focuses on fortifications of inner Catalonia. Five defense towers erected at the heart of the political-military buffer zone in the so-called Hispanic March are the starting point for a video of choreographed dance, light, and sound sequences in which the artist conjures questions about national identity, the construction of political systems, and the legends attached to them.

Produced within the Call of “la Caixa” Foundation Support for Creation’24. Production.

Curated by Franz Thalmair

Opening: December 3, 2025, 7 pm

Claudia Pagès Rabal, production image, 2024. Commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London. Courtesy of the artist

Centering on Helmut Lang’s vision of design and identity between 1986 and 2005, the exhibition highlights Lang’s role as a pioneer who embraced artistic strategies long before he departed from the fashion industry in 2005 to focus on his art practice.

With a radically intermedia approach, Helmut Lang shattered traditional norms and set new standards for clothing, graphic design, staging, architecture, experimental branding, interdisciplinary collaboration, and digital communication with uncompromising foresight. In 1998 Lang became the first designer to stream a runway show online, anticipating the global shift in how fashion would be experienced. Simultaneously, he launched over 1,000 taxi-top ads to promote the new website, becoming a landmark feature of New York City.

Lang’s work was defined not just as clothing, but as a medium of communication and part of a larger cultural narrative. His fashion presentations, known as “Séance de Travail” (work session) as well as his flagship stores in New York and Paris were statements for a strategic rethinking that prioritized experience over mere consumption.

Through his collaborations with artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jürgen Teller, and many others, he created a new visual language that redefined the boundaries between creative disciplines, cementing his role and legacy in fashion and culture until today.

The exhibition offers an unprecedented insight into the visionary designer and artist’s mindset. It forgoes the display of physical garments in favor of a contemporary, mixed media presentation featuring large-scale, site-specific installations as well as selected original materials from both the MAK Helmut Lang Archive and the artist’s own archive.

CURATOR:
Marlies Wirth, Curator Digital Culture and Design Collection

RESEARCH COLLABORATION:
Lara Steinhäußer, Curator, MAK Textiles and Carpets Collection

© MAK/Christian Mendez; © HL-ART

Sandra Mujinga (b. 1989 in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo) lives and works in Oslo. Her multidisciplinary practice spans installation, sculpture, photography, performance, video, and music. The central themes in her work revolve around the visibility of Black bodies in public space as well as the way in which opacity and ambiguity harbor the possibility of agency and self-protection.

At the center of Skin to Skin is a group of 55 identical larger-than-life figures. Swathed in heavy fabrics, they seem like creatures from another time—at once archaic and futuristic. Mirrored elements in the space multiply their presence, while a specially composed electronic soundtrack acoustically supplements the sculptural staging. Sandra Mujinga’s installation occupies the exhibition space of Belvedere 21 and invites visitors to immerse themselves in these different visual and auditory levels.

From avatars to clones and ghostly apparitions to unknown species, Mujinga’s hybrid figures invite a variety of associations. The artist develops speculative worlds where spatial and temporal layers overlap. In her newly produced work, she takes up themes from science fiction, Afrofuturism, and posthumanism, which she combines with reflections on animal survival strategies, such as camouflage and nocturnal activity, as well as an interest in bodies and identity. Repetition and camouflage function in the exhibition as means of self-empowerment and protection against external control and the imposition of stereotypes.

Installation view "Sandra Mujinga. Skin to Skin", Belvedere 21 photo: Kunst-Dokumentation.com, Manuel Carreon Lopez / Belvedere, Vienna

The Kunsthalle Wien presents the first exhibition in Austria by Guglielmo Castelli (born 1987 in Turin). The exhibition at Karlsplatz features entirely new works, including paintings, sculptures, and a site-specific mural.

“I am interested in the idea that the pictorial body, even when fragmented, remains a single body. Just like in theatre or cinema, there is a scene before and a scene after, but what happens in this moment has a limited temporality. […] This is the part that interests me: the fact that it is a representation that is essentially a frame, one that constitutes a universe of its own.”
— Guglielmo Castelli

Castelli, who trained in theatrical set design, has developed a distinctive iconography that draws on the history of painting, architecture, and literature. His compositions are characterized by an earthy, nocturnal color palette and a fluid, dreamlike quality that often makes them difficult to locate in space and time. Together, they suggest a fragmentary narrative that the artist himself compares to filmmaking, where each still image “contains a universe of its own.

Guglielmo Castelli, Toilet (Detail), 2025 Courtesy Guglielmo Castelli; Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo/Brüssel/New York/Paris und Sylvia Kouvali, London/Piräus, Foto: Nicola Morittu

With a major retrospective, the Leopold Museum presents the first comprehensive solo exhibition in Austria dedicated to the exceptional French artist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877).

Around 130 exhibits – including 90 paintings and 20 works on paper from all phases of his career, as well as numerous archival materials – offer a wide-ranging overview of the painterly and graphic oeuvre of the founder of Realism. In his groundbreaking portraits, nudes, landscapes and still lifes, Courbet radically challenged the idealizing conventions of the 19th century.

After years of intensive conceptual development and international collaboration, the exhibition “Gustave Courbet: Realist and Rebel” has now become a reality. We are delighted to present this extensive monographic exhibition to our audience. Given the remarkable scope of the artist’s oeuvre, a careful selection was required – one that is representative of all creative periods while also reflecting the thematic and formal facets of his work as a painter, draftsman and political actor. With Gustave Courbet, we present an outstanding avant-gardist who repeatedly broke with convention.

Gustave Courbet, Le sommeil | Die Schläferinnen, 1866 © Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Foto: Paris Musées/Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris

In the group exhibition “THE MATERIAL SHOW”, the focus is on the materials that support, shape, and structure our built environment: concrete, stone, wood, metal, and glass. Twelve Austrian and international artists turn their attention to the fundamental substances of architecture and to the continuous cycle of building and demolition, of usefulness and transience. Featuring works by Lara Almarcegui, Hannes Böck, Cäcilia Brown, Werner Feiersinger, Andreas Fogarasi, Daria Koltsova, LITTLE WARSAW, Markéta Othová, Bianca Pedrina, Nick Relph, Iris Touliatou, and Christoph Weber. The exhibition is curated by artist Andreas Fogarasi and MQ chief curator Astrid Peterle.

“‘We build houses. We take them apart’ does not describe a contradiction but a cycle. Building and demolition are not opposites but two sides of the same cultural technique. The exhibition ‘The Material Show’ examines precisely this process, because resources are finite. Land is contested. Cities are becoming denser. At the same time, buildings stand empty,” says MQ director Bettina Leidl.

Drawing on the long-term research of artist and co-curator Andreas Fogarasi, the exhibition brings together positions united by a shared interest. Through their artistic and research-based practices, the artists direct attention to materials that are often taken for granted and typically only noticed once they cease to function or have already been ruined. The exhibition also responds to current urban developments, such as the gigantic shell structure on Mariahilfer Straße, erected only shortly before one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in Austrian history and now being demolished again.

“THE MATERIAL SHOW” takes place in a location whose architectural structure reflects more than 300 years of change and transformation. With the planned construction of the new House of Austrian History and the greening of its inner courtyards, the MQ itself continues to evolve. In a time marked by increasing crises and upheavals, the exhibition directs attention—architecturally as well as socially—to what is necessary but should not be taken for granted. At the same time, it invites visitors to discover beauty in what is fundamental.

Ausstellungsansicht „THE MATERIAL SHOW“, MQ Freiraum, 2026 © LITTLE WARSAW, Marble Street, 2000, Courtesy Galerie Erna Hécey | MuseumsQuartier Wien, Foto: Simon Veres

General Director Stella Rollig: Is it even possible to find new aspects to spotlight in Waldmüller’s work? It is indeed! Waldmüller’s popularity and the Belvedere’s extensive holdings of his paintings make him one of the key artists in the museum’s collection. By juxtaposing his landscapes with works by other European artists, this exhibition promises fresh perspectives—even for enthusiasts and experts.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, progressive artists across Europe issued a clarion call for art to be true to nature. At the same time, they increasingly concentrated on their native landscapes. Accompanying this was a more general trend of people wanting to spend more time in the natural world, to learn about it, and to bring nature into their homes in the form of pictures. Political upheavals, social change, and advancing industrialization were the forces behind this cultural shift in the nineteenth century.

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, a major Austrian painter from the Biedermeier period, made it his goal to paint “the nature that surrounds us, our time, our customs.” His true-to-life portraits, genre scenes, and landscapes polarized opinion. Waldmüller was—and still is—best known for his realistic portraits and scenes from everyday life. Real, observed landscapes only appear as backgrounds early on in his career. This changed in the 1830s, and Waldmüller began placing the natural world at the forefront of his work, producing numerous views with striking naturalism. From that point onward, landscape assumed a decisive role in his art—an interest that remained with him until the end of his life.

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Large Prater Lanscape, 1849 Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna

Ndidi Dike is an internationally renowned British-Nigerian sculptor and multi-disciplinary artist born in London. Rare Earth Rare Justice is her first major solo exhibition at an Austrian institution. Dike works across mixed media, painting, sculpture, collage, photography, video, and installation. Her practice engages with the social, political, and economic conditions shaping the modern world, with a particular focus on the legacies of colonialism, postcolonialism, forced migration, and global capitalism.

At the centre of Rare Earth Rare Justice lies the ongoing exploitation of the African continent’s natural resources, and specifically the extraction of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Dike traces how extractive industries fuel ecological devastation, climate change, displacement, and resource-driven conflicts, exposing how global demand for technology is met through systemic violence and dispossession.

The exhibition unfolds as a large-scale installation structured around absence, death, and mourning. Suspended from the ceiling, a monumental sculpture composed of approximately nine hundred autopsy neck rests forms a bullet-like shape facing a large circular mirror. The object evokes both the lethal economies of extraction and historical loading plans of slave ship plans, in which enslaved bodies were densely packed into cargo holds, pointing to the continuities of brutality against and commodification of Black bodies.

Ndidi Dike, Rare Earth Rare Justice, Ausstellungsansicht, Secession 2026, Foto: Iris Ranzinger

With the exhibition Animalia. Of Animals and Humans, the Heidi Horten Collection explores the complex relationship between humans and animals. The term Animalia, borrowed from biology, serves as a guiding concept for a critical examination of how humans treat animals, a relationship reflected in more than 100 artworks from the 20th and 21st centuries.
 
Derived from anima, the Latin word for breath or soul, the term Animalia, coined by the naturalist Carl von Linné (1707–1778), encompasses both humans and animals alike. In contrast to this model of equality, the way humans treat animals is marked by a clear hierarchy.
 
As the supposed “pinnacle of evolution,” as a rational being that rises above the animal world, humans assign animals ambivalent roles. Artistic representations that make these different attributions visible reveal much about humans themselves; they allow conclusions to be drawn about human self-understanding and methods of projection. Thus, humans are already present in every image of an animal—even when they are not part of the depiction.

Lena Henke, UR Mutter, 2019 Heidi Horten Collection, © die Künstlerin

The Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB), the Central Bank of the Republic of Austria, made a significant financial contribution to the Leopold Museum-Privatstiftung in 1994, thus laying the groundwork for the foundation and success story of the Leopold Museum. The exhibition “Premiere!” honors the long-standing ties between the two institutions, showcasing the impressive diversity of the OeNB’s art collection for the first time in a comprehensive presentation.

Since the late 1980s, the OeNB has been collecting Austrian painting and sculpture from 1918 to the present, with special emphases on the art of the interwar period – especially New Objectivity and post-Expressionism – as well as on works in the area of geometrical and gestural abstraction after 1945.

The presentation offers a cross-section of the main tendencies in Austrian art: It features works by famous exponents of New Objectivity, including Rudolf Wacker and Franz Sedlacek, as well as independent positions from art of the interwar period, as pursued by Greta Freist and Max Oppenheimer. In terms of contemporary art after 1945, the exhibition reveals interesting parallels between different generations of artists, for instance between Maria Lassnig and Tobias Pils, as well as Svenja Deininger and Ernst Caramelle. It further highlights the various approaches to abstraction in painting, encountered in the works of artists from Martha Jungwirth to Herbert Brandl. Sculptural works, for instance by Josef Pillhofer, Julia Haugeneder or Constantin Luser, make up another important part of the collection.

MAX OPPENHEIMER, Die Schachpartie, 1925/30 © Oesterreichische Nationalbank | Foto: Sammlung Oesterreichische Nationalbank

Over a period of six months, Kunsthalle Wien will present across all of its exhibition spaces the largest survey of Vienna’s contemporary art scene that the institution has organized in more than a decade. Sculptures, installations, drawings, paintings, photographs, performances, and videos by more than fifty artists will be brought together in an exhibition that places a particular focus on newly commissioned works and pieces that have not previously been shown in Vienna.

The title of the exhibition derives from a survey first presented at Kunsthalle Wien in 2000 and revisits a format that offers insight into the dynamic, transnational, and culturally diverse artistic communities living and working in Vienna today. The exhibition will be accompanied by a year-long public program.

Complementing the exhibition, a new publication will be released featuring newly commissioned texts on all participating artists as well as transcripts of conversations between curators, artists, and critics living and working in Vienna, published in both German and English.

Judith Eisler, Hanna, 2019

Since the Italian Renaissance, the increasingly prominent question of a hierarchy of the arts, one that fueled, among other things, the rivalry between painting and sculpture, came to an end with the advent of modernism. In this exhibition, where the work of a sculptor encounters that of a painter, the intention is not to revive the paragone debate in art-theoretical terms, but rather to stage a dialogue between two artistic personalities who, despite their differences in historical, spatial, and cultural contexts, reveal striking analogies both in formal aesthetics and in the phenomenology of their work. This juxtaposition of Herbert Boeckl (1894–1966) and Hans Josephsohn (1920–2012), who never met during their lifetimes, nevertheless highlights fundamental parallels in their understanding of corporeality, materiality, and the process of form-finding.

Neither Boeckl nor Josephsohn, and this despite the growing prominence of abstract art since the 1950s, pursued a path into abstraction. They remained committed to figuration and, in particular, to the human figure as a bearer of artistic expression. Although both engaged in a pronounced process of abstraction in their depictions of the human body, often dispensing with anatomical detail, they sought to distill the essential through radical simplification and intense concentration. As a result, many of their figures appear de-individualized and stylized, presenting a universal form of the human. Despite, and perhaps because of, this reduction, which transforms the “portrayed” into pure form, their figures possess a powerful expressive force. This specific auratic presence is evoked through expressive simplicity, formal reduction, and not least an impressive material immediacy. Their shared interest in the physicality of materials provides yet another point of correspondence: while Boeckl applies paint thickly, almost sculpturally or in relief-like layers, Josephsohn works in a comparably additive manner in his plaster modeling and the castings derived from it.

HERBERT BOECKL, Gruppe am Waldrand, 1920 © Leopold Museum, Wien | Foto: Leopold Museum, Wien © Herbert Boeckl-Nachlass, Wien

Sober, clear, objective – these adjectives describe the new way of seeing the world following the fallout of World War I. The type of “art photography”, practiced until 1914 especially by ambitious amateurs, with its romanticizing estheticism, had become obsolete. This new movement provided a direct, unadorned pictorial style, which accommodated the needs of the medium and represented a clear commitment to technological Modernism. In Germany, Ellen Auerbach, Aenne Biermann, Karl Blossfeldt, Alfred Ehrhardt, Albert Renger-Patzsch and August Sander adhered to a “new objective photography” which culminated in the 1929 exhibition Film und Foto organized by the German Werkbund. Championing a visual language in keeping with the times, the exhibition, which was shown in Vienna straight after its initial presentation in Stuttgart, impacted on the oeuvres of Austrian photographers, including Trude Fleischmann, Grete Kolliner, Rudolf Koppitz and Otto Skall.

Following central motifs and themes, the exhibition showcases in excess of one hundred preeminent artistic positions of New Photography from the 1920s and 30s and features a selection of works from renowned European museums, institutions and collections, as well as works from private collections that have never been displayed before.

WIENER WERKSTÄTTE/WILHELM WILLINGER (Fotografie), Kleid entworfen von Eduard Wimmer-Wisgrill (1882–1961), 1919 © Leopold Museum, Wien | Foto: Leopold Museum, Wien