Can Vienna’s Galleries Build a Market of Their Own?

Vienna’s relationship with art has been shaped by revolt. In 1897, Gustav Klimt and a group of artists broke with the conservative Künstlerhaus to found the Secession, creating a platform for new work and international exchange. More than a century later, the challenge is different: can Vienna’s public institutions help sustain the commercial galleries that keep its art scene alive?

In recent weeks, two Vienna galleries have closed, a third is due to close in December and Emanuel Layr has announced a change to his gallery’s model. Earlier this autumn, more than 80 galleries took part in the inaugural Astoria Artshow, which organisers say drew around 28,000 visitors. The contrast is Vienna’s art-market dilemma: can a scene that still draws galleries, curators and crowds sustain the commercial spaces at its centre?

The autumn programme brought together three markedly different formats: Parallel, the established hybrid fair combining commercial galleries, artist statements, independent projects and institutions; the inaugural Astoria Artshow, staged across more than 10,000sqm in a 1920s multi-storey car park; and the 17th edition of Curated by, which invited international curators to take over 24 commercial galleries across the city.

For gallerists, the value of this density lies not only in what sells during an opening weekend, but also in who comes to Vienna. Attilia Fattori Franchini, co-director of Curated by, says the festival is above all about bringing what is happening elsewhere into the city. Vincenzo della Corte of VIN VIN calls it “a genuinely unique model within the international gallery landscape”, pointing to the “real sense of exchange” between Vienna’s galleries and the role public initiatives play in creating it.

A Gallery Market Under Pressure

Zeller van Almsick and EXILE closed their Vienna spaces on 17 October. Eva Presenhuber’s Vienna gallery is due to close in December; its website lists an exhibition there from 11 November to 4 December. Emanuel Layr is winding down the gallery in its current form and plans to turn the space into an invitation-only salon.

Layr describes an exhausting cycle of back-to-back exhibitions and fairs, increasingly dominated by logistics. “Everything has become more expensive,” he says. “At a major fair, once you need a certain amount of space to realise an idea and factor in the other costs, you can easily approach or exceed six figures.” Many galleries, he stresses, are operations employing three to ten people rather than large businesses.

Martin Janda, founder of Galerie Martin Janda, considers Vienna rents comparatively affordable by the standards of London, Paris and Berlin, and tenant protections an advantage for some small businesses. Their scope varies according to the premises and lease. He says staffing costs are a significant pressure: “Staffing costs account for an enormous part of expenditure.”

For Layr, the answer is structural change. An agency-like model could combine artist representation, dealing and temporary projects without carrying the same fixed programme overheads. Janda reads the moment differently. “I don’t see a catastrophe in Vienna. I see a market that is changing considerably,” he says. 

Janda also points to what he sees as a strong Austrian presence among Art Basel’s VIP visitors. “If you take Art Basel, for example, and look at the ranking of VIPs there, you notice that Austria occupies a relatively high position,” he says, though no published figures are available to quantify that claim.

I’m Very Into You Exhibition ChecklistInstallation Views □IV 01I’m Very Into You, curated by Marta Papini, 2026. Installation view. Photo: Flavio Palasciano; Courtesy of the Artists, Fondazione Lydia Silvestri and VIN VIN Vienna.

The Collector Gap

The scale of Vienna’s private collector base is difficult to measure. The Art Basel and UBS collecting survey covers 3,100 high-net-worth individuals across ten markets, but does not include Austria. The City of Vienna offers one measure of municipal buying: in 2025, MA7 acquired around 80 works by artists living and working in the city, with €400,000 available.

Layr describes a market in which museums, foundations and institutions remain consequential buyers, while the pool of private collectors capable of consistently supporting contemporary programmes is comparatively narrow. He sees the gap as cultural as well as economic: private patronage is more deeply embedded in US society, he says, while in Austria contemporary art enters public consciousness later and collecting is often sustained within established families rather than replenished by new buyers.

Janda links the narrow middle of today’s market to history and policy. Vienna had significant private collections, including bourgeois and Jewish collections, before Nazi rule. The persecution and dispossession of Jewish collectors dispersed many of them. Janda argues that these losses disrupted the city’s bourgeois collecting milieu, though their direct effect on today’s collector base is difficult to measure. He also points to Austria’s conservative aristocratic collecting traditions and tax burden as possible obstacles to building a broader base of buyers.

He also sees a mismatch between galleries’ international reach and local demand. “Viennese galleries have always had to look internationally. That has shaped their programmes, but it has also widened the gap between what galleries show and what local collectors are prepared to buy. There are collectors here, of course, but the middle of the market often struggles to follow,” Janda says.

Janda nevertheless sees the permanent gallery as part of the solution: most visitors will never buy anything, but repeated encounters with art can help cultivate collectors who do not yet exist.

Internationalisation as Solution and Problem

Della Corte describes a broader European environment in which economic uncertainty and international instability have made galleries and collectors more cautious, while shipping costs have risen. Peichl identifies Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a turning point, and says higher interest rates have changed buying behaviour. “During the long period of very low interest rates, art was an attractive investment,” he says. “Once rates rose again, people could earn relatively safe returns through more conventional investments.”

Janda also points to the cumulative effect of crises. “A gallery only earns money when work is sold. If fewer works sell, the whole structure suffers, even though the workload remains the same,” he says.

This contradiction becomes clearest at fairs. Galleries often travel to build markets for less established artists, yet Layr argues that cautious buyers increasingly favour familiar names. “You can primarily make sales with very safe, established blue-chip art. So what is the point?” he asks. The platforms intended to extend a gallery’s reach can actually make experimentation harder to sustain.

Cutting Back, Without Disappearing

Janda has adjusted his model. “A few years ago, we decided to do fewer fairs and concentrate more intensely on the ones we attend,” he says, while placing greater emphasis on developing artists’ careers and relationships with museums and private collections.

Vienna’s own fair landscape makes that recalibration particularly visible. In December 2025, Der Standard reported that the accumulated losses of Viennacontemporary’s operator, VC Artfairs GmbH, had risen to more than €3 million, as confirmed by managing director Markus Huber. Messe Wien had also sued over around €470,000 in unpaid rent for 2024 and 2025. In January 2026, Huber confirmed that the fair would not continue in its previous form. SPARK Art Fair paused its 2026 edition and announced plans to return in 2027.

Installation view of Special Show at Parallel Vienna 2026. Courtesy of Parallel Vienna.

Peichl argues that too many competing formats created fragmentation and confusion. “An art fair needs stability,” he says. “Fairgoers need a fixed location and date in the calendar. That stability collapsed over the last four or five years.”

Astoria was an attempt to rethink the model. It was organised by VAU Vienna Art United, the non-profit association founded in April 2026. Thirty-five Vienna-based galleries joined the association within two weeks; more than 80 galleries from across Europe exhibited at the Astoria Artshow. Rather than relying solely on an external fair operator, the inaugural event combined gallery participation fees with €111,000 in public funding from the City of Vienna and the Austrian federal government, according to Peichl. He says the support was crucial to getting the first edition off the ground. 

A tiered fee structure was designed to distribute costs more evenly. Peichl describes those fees as “a very important conceptual tool”, adding that “stronger galleries should help support weaker ones”. Janda, Zeller van Almsick and EXILE all took part, showing that galleries in different positions within Vienna’s market were willing to invest in the same experiment.

Peichl is explicit that Astoria’s ambitions extend beyond the Austrian market. “Vienna is a hub for the international art market as a whole, or at least it should become one,” he says, describing the ambition as building “a central, important, relevant European art fair”. 

Its first edition already included galleries from Norway, Denmark, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands alongside participants from Central and Eastern Europe. Peichl argues that galleries from Eastern Europe should participate on equal terms with those from France, Italy, Britain and Northern Europe. 

Galleries travelling from Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia and Romania repeatedly told him, he says, that “Vienna is our art market”. One Romanian gallerist went further: “We are so grateful that Vienna is doing this because we do not have an art market at home. Vienna is our art market. Please continue doing this.”

The organisers reported around 28,000 visitors, against an expectation of about 5,000. Around 28,000 visitors do not mean 28,000 buyers, though Peichl argues that the turnout points to an audience with buying potential, particularly in the lower and middle segments.

Although Astoria had initially been conceived more as a collective showcase than a sales-driven fair, Peichl says it performed unexpectedly well as a marketplace, with several galleries selling out their presentations and others reporting multiple sales across both lower and higher price segments. He argues that Vienna’s strength is unlikely to lie in the €400,000-plus transactions associated with Art Basel, but rather in a broader lower- and mid-market where buyers are still willing to engage.

A Balance of Public and Private

The City of Vienna budgeted €322.285 million for culture and science in 2026, excluding the adult-education centres (VHS).

Astoria provides a smaller but concrete example of how public funding can enter the commercial ecosystem without directly subsidising galleries’ day-to-day operations: Peichl says €111,000 in combined municipal and federal support helped launch the fair, while participating galleries remained its largest source of income. Ticket sales were the second-largest revenue stream.

Longer-term uncertainty lies in politics. The far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) won the largest share of votes in Austria’s 2024 federal election. That federal result does not itself determine Vienna’s cultural funding, and what a different political balance might mean for the city is unclear. Janda places his concern in a broader European context. “When I look at Britain with Farage, France with Le Pen, Italy with Meloni or the AfD in Germany, I would say the political right here is still comparatively contained.”

“Vienna has an exceptionally lively art ecosystem,” Della Corte says. “It may not be a market hub on the scale of London or Paris, but the combination of private collecting, strong institutions and public support creates a remarkably balanced structure.”

Curated by is one example of that overlap. Funded by the City of Vienna and realised through participating galleries, the initiative brings public support directly into the commercial gallery ecosystem. Della Corte says its value extends beyond immediate sales: a curator may discover an artist, a collector may encounter a gallery for the first time, or an institutional relationship may develop in the long term.

Whether Astoria and Curated by can turn these encounters into sustained support for galleries remains an open question, but the push to adapt and build new structures collectively is already taking shape.