Two More Vienna Galleries Close, Citing ‘No New Collectors’ and ‘Challenging’ Financial Landscape

Two more galleries in Vienna are closing or changing their models amid market challenges, reports the Art Newspaper (TAN).

Zeller van Almsick and Exile cite high costs and unreliable sales. This development comes after Zurich’s Eva Presenhuber is closing the Vienna outpost she has operated since 2022, as she told ARTnews in October, and Emanuel Layr changing his operating model.

Exile is calling it quits after some 18 years, with founder Christian Siekmeier telling TAN that “there are simply no new collectors emerging.” The gallery was founded in Berlin in 2008 and moved to Vienna after a decade, showing older generations including Alvin Baltrop and Nathalie du Pasquier as well as younger artists such as David Gruber and Katharina Marszewski.

Zeller van Almsick is shuttering after a decade. “There is no point in sugarcoating the fact that the past two years have been financially extremely challenging,” cofounder Magdalena Zeller told TAN. The gallery showed younger Austrian artists including Dejan Dukic, Carsten Fock, and Bianca Phos.

Layr, meanwhile, will go nomadic, while keeping a smaller, by-appointment showroom in the capital, as the founder revealed in September. “The gallery model as we know it is increasingly reaching its limits,” said Layr, who mounted his first show in 2011, at the time, while also saying that “financial reasons played no part” in the decision. The gallery’s roster includes such well-known artists as Julien Bismuth, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, and Leah Ke Yi Zheng.

He now tells TAN, “It’s harder to sell some things, costs are getting higher, then there’s a big art fair coming and taking another €100,000. I had to be more realistic, and think, ‘How much profit do I get? How much does the artist get?’”

These troubles come despite the fact that the city, whose metro area is home to 2.9 million, is rich with both historical and contemporary art institutions, as Art in America’s Emily Watlington wrote in 2025 after a dozen visits, calling it “Europe’s best art city.” But Zeller tells TAN that there is “a significant gap” between the city’s cultural heft and the level of activity among its collectors.

In a contrasting signal of the local market’s potential, a number of top Vienna galleries have banded together to launch a new fair, Astoria Artshow, which had its inaugural outing in September. That followed troubles at both the Spark Art Fair Vienna and Vienna Contemporary.

Longtime contemporary art collector Eva Frey tells TAN that there are not enough collectors in her age cohort (over 70) to sustain the city’s galleries. At the same time, she says there are not enough collectors in the 45 to 55 range, formerly the principal group supporting contemporary art, who are “established in a profession.”