Vienna Actionism Museum to Cease Exhibition Program Following Controversial Otto Muehl Show

The Vienna Actionism Museum will end its exhibition program in 2027 and transition into a research institution dedicated to the transgressive postwar art movement, Monopol reports. The research institution will be open to the public by appointment only.

The privately owned institution has been a controversial presence in Austria’s art scene since opening in 2024, owing to its focus on a movement known for violent, visceral performances that often used blood and excrement as materials. But public discontent escalated into outrage earlier this year, after the museum announced that its fall exhibition would be dedicated to the work of prominent Actionist Otto Muehl, who was convicted in 1991 of crimes including the sexual abuse of minors living in a commune he led throughout the 1970s and ’80s. The show opened on September 10 and will be on view through January 10, 2027.

Muehl reentered the art scene with apparent ease after his release in 1997, receiving exhibitions at prominent Viennese institutions, including the Museum of Applied Arts, the Leopold Museum, and the gallery W&K – Wienerroither & Kohlbacher. His market surged after his death in 2014, with his works continuing to fetch six-figure prices at galleries and auction houses throughout the 2010s, according to the Artnet Price Database.

This year made clear that Muehl’s legacy was no longer so easily defended. The Vienna Actionism Museum’s exhibition, titled “Otto Muehl: Art at the Abyss,” reignited debate in Austria over the presentation of his work, particularly after several living survivors of the commune spoke out against the show. Mathilda, a group led by former commune members, called on the institution financially divest from Muehl’s work, and on the Austrian government to investigate how the commune functioned with impunity for nearly two decades. In September, protesters organized under Mathilda gathered outside the museum, displaying large banners bearing the German phrases “Pedophile criminal and cult leader” and “Perpetrator’s museum.”

Despite the backlash, the museum appeared to stand by the exhibition. “Otto Muehl is one of the major figures of Austrian, European postwar art,” Klaus Albrecht Schroeder, the show’s curator and the director of the Vienna Actionism Museum, told the New York Times. “Talking about Muehl’s artistic importance doesn’t diminish the gravity of his crimes, and acknowledging his crimes doesn’t erase his place in art history.”

Muehl’s performances, spanning the 1960s through his arrest in 1990, are documented in photographs that capture the hallmarks of his practice: nudity, violence, and provocation. Like many of his Actionist peers, Muehl frequently staged group performances. Over time, however, his artistic practice became inextricably entangled with the criminal activity at the commune, raising difficult ethical questions about how his work should be studied and the complicity involved in its continued sale.

Ruth Bourgogne, a former commune member, has said that Muehl’s series of paintings known as “Rutschbilder,” or “Sliding Pictures,” were made by painting on the bodies of girls he had sexually abused and dragging them across the canvas. “The pictures look beautiful, but they are horrific; you can’t see the suffering on their faces, but it’s inside them,” she said during a public debate at the Vienna Festival last year. Another former commune member, who remained anonymous, recounted being sexually abused from the age of three. A nude photograph taken of her when she was 12 was later sold at a prominent Viennese auction house, a sale she described as agonizing to watch.

The “sliding” works are not included in the Vienna Actionism Museum’s exhibition, though they continue to attract interest at auction: one sold for €25,000 (roughly $29,000) in 2020. According to the museum, it only exhibited works created before the founding of the commune in 1970. The museum’s founder, art dealer Philipp Konzett acquired a trove of Muehl’s works from the Friedrichshof Cooperative, which was run by former commune members after the commune’s collapse. Museum director Julia Moebus-Puckener Activismus has defended its mission as not “glorifying perpetrators” and stated that the institution does not sell paintings.

The museum exhibited a wide range of work made by the central figures of Viennese Actionism, including Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Work by Muehl, however, accounted for a large part of the museum’s collection. Museum shareholders said in a statement today that the “justified moral condemnation” of Muehl now overshadows his artistic legacy, making an exhibition of his work no longer viable.

Muehl expressed regret for certain offenses in 2010, on the occasion of a major retrospective at the Leopold Museum. He struck a less contrite tone in a 2004 interview with Die Zeit, in which he characterized his convictions as “character assassination” and described the teenagers he sexually abused as “fully developed girls.”

ARTnews has contacted the museum for comment.