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When thousands of Taylor Swift fans saw their Vienna concert plans dashed last month due to security threats, the city’s art institutions came to the rescue. Offering free entry to Swift ticket holders, museums across the city literally opened their doors as a cultural refuge. The program was a major success, with the Albertina in particular welcoming more than 20,000 fans over three days. As the Swifties returned home, many left with an insight the art world is only beginning to acknowledge: Vienna is more than just a destination to revisit the old masters.
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Part of the modernization within the art scene comes from the city’s steady growth. Vienna recorded its second-best year ever for tourism in 2023, recording 17.3 million overnight stays, and a third of Vienna’s population doesn’t hold an Austrian passport. Its 1.8 million residents represent more than 180 nationalities, a 12 percent increase since 2007. And the growing art scene reflects this diversification. By 2025, Vienna will host 15 art fairs, ranging from the Affordable Art Fair—featuring works priced under €7,500—to the high-end Art at the Park event at the Park Hyatt Hotel. The record number of fairs signals a healthy appetite for discovery in the Austrian capital.
Collectors like Valeria Napoleone, whose focus is on promoting women artists, are taking note. “The gallery scene is strong, with different generations of gallerists and very unexpected programs. [It’s] certainly great for new discoveries,” she told ARTnews. “I am particularly excited at a few incredible people becoming part of the Viennese contemporary art scene, in the past few months alone. What’s not to love about all this?”
Vienna’s rising stature in the contemporary art world is not lost on Francesca Gavin, the London-born writer and curator who was named artistic director of the viennacontemporary art fair last October. The fair is set to celebrate its landmark 10th edition this weekend at the Messe Wien Exhibition & Congress Center. Gavin is no stranger to viennacontemporary, having last year curated its ZONE1 and VCT ACTIVATION programs, which feature Austria-based artists under 40 and a special art-tech collaboration, respectively. Both programs received critical acclaim, and positioned Gavin as a visionary force in Vienna’s art community.
If she has any nerves about taking over from former artistic director Boris Ondreička, an artist and curator who has shown work at the Venice Biennale and over half a dozen other biennials, Gavin isn’t letting on.
“Before I came to Vienna, I didn’t realize how culturally engaged and how interesting the work coming out of the city was,” Gavin told ARTnews. “I think collectors will come because the work is good. It’s about people realizing how culturally engaged and strong the younger generation of work coming out of [the city] is.”
This year’s edition of viennacontemporary coincides with two other art events in the city. The first is Parallel, a site-specific, installation-focused festival running September 11–15 at the Otto Wagner Areal. The second is Curated By, in which dozens of Vienna galleries open shows helmed by international curators just days after viennacontemporary wraps up. The timing isn’t a coincidence.
“From now on, we’re making sure we coincide with Curated By because that is such an incredible project,” she said. “That kind of collegial relationship is really important to build what a city can be.”
While Gavin may have started as a culture journalist for publications like British lifestyle magazine Dazed and then Time Out, her CV has since filled up with arts accomplishments: 10 books on visual culture, a position as founding curator of Soho House’s 3,000-work collection, a cocuratorship of Manifesta 11 in Zurich, and curation of a number of international exhibitions. She continues to host a monthly art history radio show and serves as editor-in-chief of the annual culture magazine EPOCH REVIEW. Its newest issue features Barbara Kruger, Grace Wales Bonner, Marc Goehring, and Thundercat.
For the organizers of viennacontemporary, Gavin’s busy plate was an asset, not a hindrance. “As they put it, anything that helps to continue establishing me as a voice with a strong network within the art world is great for the fair,” Gavin said of her continuing to edit EPOCH REVIEW.
Gavin is not new to Austria’s art scene, having moved to Vienna in 2020 and quickly forging connections with artists, gallerists, and collectors. When discussing the city, her eyes light up. It’s clear Gavin loves it. “Vienna is a space where you can experiment and discover, and I think that is really valuable. I love the idea of an art fair being the heart of a moment [and] for people to taste that,” she said. For Gavin, it’s both this new interconnection and old history that presents a total package. “At some fairs, people go for the art and don’t necessarily want to visit the city. People want to come to Vienna as a place. That’s an opportunity. It’s an incredible city with a really rich art heritage. That’s where we benefit.”
Big changes are in store for the fair, which was relocated to Messe Wien’s Halle D, tripling its space and encompassing high ceilings, natural light, and a more convenient location. (The fair was previously held at Kursalon Music Hall, a grandiose but cramped 19th-century Renaissance building.) This year’s edition will host 98 galleries and six institutional stands from 24 countries, a major jump from last year’s 61 galleries from 19 countries. Galleries debuting there this year include Kvalitář Gallery in Prague, Gallery RIMA in Belgrade, and a handful of Italian spaces like Giorgio Persano in Turin, RizzutoGallery in Palermo, and Pinksummer in Genoa.
“I’m really happy with the gallery list’s expansion,” Gavin said. “In particular, all the great galleries in Austria, but also some really good ones from abroad, ranging from Ashes/Ashes in New York to Zero… and eastcontemporary in Milan and Dawid Radziszewski in Warsaw. We’ve got some good new additions that haven’t shown at the fair before.”
The fair is not short on programming, with numerous prizes and special sections. The Collectors Prize, presented in collaboration with the Vienna Collectors Club and VORmagazin, will award €1,000 to one emerging artist in the ZONE1 section. Meanwhile, the Queer Art Prize has two categories: the Community Prize awards one queer artist a grand prize of €1,000 and two runners-up with €500 each, while the Gallery Prize rewards galleries that promote queer art in their fair booth. One special section at the fair is CONTEXT, curated by art adviser Pernilla Holmes, and featuring nine “largely female-focused and Eastern European-focused” solo presentations of artists from the late 20th century; a second special section is ZONE1, curated this year by Bruno Mokross, whose Independent Space Index connects the multiplicity of project spaces around Vienna. Finally, Salzburger Kunstverein director Mirela Baciak has taken the reins of the VCT STATEMENT to present “The Color of Energy,” an exhibition that unites art and politics through the lens of climate; it features works by Sophie Jung, Shubigi Rao, and Liv Bugge, among others. The show will debut at viennacontemporary and appear a week later at Salzburger Kulturverein.
Viennacontemporary opens, of course, amid wider shifts in the art market. The Armory Show opened last week in New York noticeably lacking much of the energy of previous editions, and while Frieze Seoul fared better, few works there sold for more than $500,000. Not exactly a triumphant opening to the all-important fall season.
“I’ve been saying I should have a T-shirt made saying NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR GLOBAL ECONOMICS,” Gavin said, with a laugh. “This is a tough year. War, inflation, and a lot of instability around galleries. It’s a tough year to grow a fair, yet somehow, we’ve managed it.”
The fair occupies an increasingly crowded field of small and medium fairs in Europe, leaving aside Frieze London and Art Basel Paris, which open next month. Copenhagen’s CHART art fair held its 12th edition at the end of August, and Artissima in Turin and Art Cologne open in November.
For Clemens and Saskia Leopold, twin collectors whose grandfather Rudolf founded the Leopold Museum, viennacontemporary stands out among the crowd thanks to its overlap with a packed schedule of art events. “The timing guarantees [that an] international audience of not only collectors but also of young and established artists and curators [are] in Vienna,” they told ARTnews. “In comparison to bigger art fairs, viennacontemporary is a very important [space] for its internationally oriented galleries to engage with Viennese collectors and facilitate more intimate encounters with the gallerists.”
While it’s too early to determine viennacontemporary’s success, Gavin is hoping the fair will show off the vibrancy of Vienna’s contemporary art community, not just the city’s wealth of art history.
“I aim to show that if you invest in and develop the contemporary art world as an industry—and the businesses connected to that—that also creates a wider cultural awareness throughout the entire city,” Gavin said. “It helps recenter how people view a place. We know that culture brings people, brings finances, brings energy. It’s really interesting to focus on how to do that.”
