Heidi Horten Collection Vienna

The Heidi Horten Collection in the heart of the historical city of Vienna

The Heidi Horten Collection is the exhibition hotspot in the heart of the historical city of Vienna. Situated right next to the State Opera, it is a private museum: a passionate female collector’s vision has been fulfilled. Spectacular architecture encounters high-caliber works by Klimt, Picasso, and Warhol.

The art collector Heidi Goëss-Horten

With great passion and sensitivity, Heidi Horten (1941-2022, born in Vienna) built an art collection of international stature. Over decades she has amassed an impressive selection of several hundred paintings, sculptures, and graphic works. Her collection provides an overview of how art has developed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In one seminal instance, Mrs. Horten acquired some thirty modern and contemporary art masterpieces for many millions at a single auction in London. In so doing, she endowed her collection practically overnight, with art-historical significance and a high profile.

Extensive collection

This step altered the collection’s scope, as it now included artists previously unrepresented, such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Joan Miró, Max Pechstein, Carl Hofer, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, René Magritte, Fernand Léger, Niki de Saint Phalle, Egon Schiele, Lucio Fontana, Jean Dubuffet, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Yves Klein and Georg Baselitz. Their works are beyond doubt highlights of the collection today. In the years that followed, she purchased essential works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, establishing a focus on Pop Art. Damien Hirst, Niki de Saint Phalle, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter also acquired groundbreaking works. The Heidi Horten Collection now comprises not only paintings and works of graphic art but also a striking sculpture park that is showcased at the newly opened museum.  

The current exhibition in the Heidi Horten Collection

We ❤️ (we love): 24th November 2023 until 25th August 2024

The exhibition features a selection of high-caliber artworks from the Heidi Horten Collection, curated in three thematic categories that represent the collection's principal content areas: Expressionism, especially in its German variant; art from the 1960s and 1970s, with a specific emphasis on U.S., Italian, and German positions and painting and sculpture in the field of tension between figuration and abstraction.

Visitors of the museum will play a significant role in the exhibition concept. They will have the opportunity to select around twenty artworks from the collection, either on-site or through social media, which will then be permanently displayed in a special area of the museum.

The Heidi Horten Collection is home to a masterpiece by Gustav Klimt entitled Church in Unterach on Lake Attersee, created between 1915 and 1916. The artwork will be featured in one of the “Kabinett” rooms alongside graphic works by artists of the same period. These works are juxtaposed in dialogue with contemporary works from the Heidi Horten Collection. The unifying element is the square – Klimt's trademark, as it were – which gained exceptional popularity in "Vienna around 1900" and has since been adopted by an astonishing number of contemporary artists.

We ❤ is inherently linked to the WOW! exhibition that took place in 2018. Following its successful presentation at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, Heidi Goëss-Horten decided to build a museum to permanently house the collection, with the goal of making it accessible to a broader audience and creating an art experience for anyone to enjoy. By directly involving visitors in selecting artworks, the vision of the museum's founder takes on a fresh perspective.

An exhibition guide for the Heidi Horten Collection will be released to coincide with the show.

Your Benefit with EasyCityPass Vienna: 20 % discount on the standard admission price*

*no further discount on already reduced tickets (e.g. seniors, students, groups, etc.). Children up to their 19th birthday have free entrance.