The official outdoor tour! Why not take a walk with us around the St. Stephen's Cathedral and discover the most important landmark and symbol of Vienna!This tour was created in cooperation with St. Stephen’s Cathedral.

St. Stephen’s Outdoor Experience

Vienna is full of history! Discover it by walking through the small alleys around the Rotenturmstraße. Every corner and cobblestone will tell you about the genesis of the city. If you are tired, we recommend visiting one of the famous Viennese coffeehouses. 

Explore the Heart of Old Vienna

Vienna is new to you, and you are looking to get a nicely well-rounded overview of the old city center? This tour covers historical highlights, reveals fascinating stories, and takes you down a few cobblestone streets that most visitors never see.

Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Vienna

Discover plants from all around the globe: This audio tour of the Palm House Schönbrunn will enable you to discover more than 4,000 plants from every continent.Note: The Palm House Schönbrunn is not to be confused with the Café Palmenhaus. The café is located in the Burggarten.

The Emperor's Greenhouse: Palm House

Attention! This tour includes saucy details and is not appropriate for all under 18 years.From prostitutes, johns, and mistresses to animal skin condoms, syphilis, and wax noses, to Maria Theresia, Metternich, Napoleon, and many more: the dirty secrets and shady sides of Viennese erotic activities over the years come out of the shadows in this tour. This tour was created in cooperation with wienfuehrung.

Love for Sale in Old Vienna

Naschmarkt not only offers culinary highlights but also architectural ones: the Art Deco and Viennese Modern Age buildings by Otto Wagner. This tour starts at the subway station Kettenbrückengasse and passes through Naschmarkt to Karlsplatz where two pavillons by Otto Wagner can be visited. If there's enough time afterwards, you could take the U4 in either the direction of Heiligenstadt or Hütteldorf and get out at one of the beautiful old Stadtbahn (city railway) station buildings that are still in use today.

Otto Wagner and Naschmarkt

Rent a bike, Segway, or scooter and explore the best Vienna has to offer on wheels. With your wheels, you can cover a lot of ground, meaning you’ll finish this tour with a well-rounded overview of the makeup of this old dame of a city and the stories it has to tell. Attention: Leave your phone in your pocket while driving and don't forget to keep your distance. Stay safe!

Vienna On Wheels: From Schönbrunn Palace to Stubentor

Get yourself a ride and head out on this exciting tour on which you’ll catch many sides of Vienna that most visitors never see. You’ll get started at the magnificent Hundertwasserhaus and end it all in the wine hills with a glass of delicious wine or grape juice in hand and a spectacular view over Vienna. Attention: Leave your phone in your pocket while driving and don't forget to keep your distance. Stay safe!

Vienna On Wheels: From Hundertwasserhaus up to the Wine Hills

Waltz through the city and discover the places that inspired great musicians that have walked Vienna’s streets. Meet Beethoven, Mozart, and the Strausses and find out more about the role Vienna has played in the history of music.

A Music Lover’s Guide to Vienna

Discover in this audio tour the history and architecture of the Secession and get to know interesting facts about the artists' association. Also, find out more about the Secession as an exhibition space for contemporary art and the world-famous Beethoven Frieze by Gustav Klimt.

Tour Through the Vienna Secession  | Cultural Places

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This virtual art nouveau adventure was produced by the Viennese Secession in collaboration with the Cultural Places team.

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Welcome

Founding the Secession

Foyer

History of the Building

Side Facade

Main Facade

Welcome to the audio tour through the Secession.

Exhibition Program

General Renovation

Architectural Structure

The main exhibition room has something sacred about it – it is reminiscent of a basilica. A raised central aisle is flanked by two aisles. This structure is completed by a transept. The special thing about this showroom is that it does not require ornaments, in contrast to other showrooms that were cluttered with ornaments.

Hauptraum / Main Room

Return to Vienna: The Paintings of Tess Jaray For over sixty years, Tess Jaray has made formally austere paintings, dedicating herself to an analysis of the relationships between painting and architecture, between picture and beholder. Given that her oeuvre spans such a long time, a conventional retrospective would hardly have been uninteresting. Yet in Return to Vienna: The Paintings of Tess Jaray, the British artist with Austrian roots chose to present something different: a selection of thirty-five paintings, the majority dating from the past several years, that shed light on current concerns in her art such as her investigation of the art-historical tradition of the circular painting. These recent pictures are flanked by an ensemble of five paintings from the 1960s, the period in Jaray’s oeuvre when she devised her unmistakable personal visual language: a nonrepresentational and formalist painterly practice that employs basic geometric shapes, patterns, repetition, seriality, precision, and linearity to chart the manifold interactions between painting and space, color and surface, form and content, perception and emotion.Jaray’s art reflects diverse influences that are explained by her unusual life: born to Jewish parents in Vienna in 1937, she grew up in England in a family of émigrés, steeped in the culture in which her parents had been raised and which they continued to treasure in their adopted homeland. Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka were formative in her education, subsequently rounded out by her immersing herself in the work of the German Expressionists and, as a student, the American Abstract Expressionists. Two cultural encounters have been her constant sources of inspiration for decades, encouraging her to develop her own style, and both have left traces in the works on display: her studies of the paintings and architecture of the Italian Renaissance—the painter Piero della Francesca, in particular, has cast a lasting spell over her—; and her fascination with Islamic art, which she explored on travels to Morocco and later to Syria and Jordan in the 1980s. Rather than replicating these influences in her works, Jaray subjects them to an intellectual, emotional, and intuitive transformation before integrating them into her characteristic visual idiom.The works in the exhibition, most of them in large formats, play with basic geometric shapes, simple patterns, color fields in harmoniously balanced hues, or vigorous chromatic contrasts. They aim at visual effects such as illusions of depth, afterimages, and optical shimmering while stimulating the mind no less than the senses—in short, they demand focused contemplation. The titles offer cues for interpretation; some are descriptive (Seventeen Small Squares, 2018), while others hint at a process of artistic research (Discovery &amp; Proof, 2018) or architectonic references (Citadel, 2017) or evoke a mood (Victory, 2019). The drawing—as study, sketch, and draft—is an indispensable aid in the artist’s work on her paintings, extensive printed oeuvre, and designs for public spaces. The artist’s book published in conjunction with the exhibition presents a survey of her graphic output between 1960 and 2000.“Through the process of entirely intuitive drawing, suddenly a line or a shape may take on a meaning that can be developed. These drawings are in a way an archaeology of the unconscious mind. A way to make discoveries on paper that may be developed into paintings. Paul Klee famously spoke about ‘taking a line for a walk.’ I would take that further and say that for me it’s a record of travelling with a pencil.” (Tess Jaray)Tess Jaray was born in Vienna in 1937 and lives and works in London.The artist’s book Tess Jaray. Thinking on Paper is available in the Secession shop (EUR 35,-).

Tess Jaray

Joseph Maria Olbrich

Joseph Maria Olbrich was born on December 22, 1867 in Troppau, which is now in the Czech Republic. He came into contact with construction as a child since his father owned a brick factory. In the mid-1880s, he moved to Vienna to enter the architecture class of the "Wiener Gewerbeschule." After graduation, he studied from 1890 at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1893, Olbrich entered Otto Wagner's office, where he drew, among other things, detailed plans for the Vienna Stadtbahn buildings. The Vienna Secession was also built at this time.

Forum for New Art

Galerie / Gallery

The gallery is the third exhibition room of the Secession. It consists of a cross-shaped room, a small space in between and a long room at the end of the gallery. Paintings and photographs are mainly exhibited by international artists. The gallery is also well suited for projections.

At first glance, the artist duo Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel’s works may seem like anachronisms in this era of the ascent of digital technology: the two have spent years experimenting with a wide range of materials and techniques that they first had to teach themselves and for which they sometimes even needed to make their own equipment such as weaving frames or wood-fired furnaces. They cut stone, carve wood, mold clay and ceramics, and take up artisanal techniques like embroidery and weaving. Both emphasize the importance of executing their works with their own means, using traditional and modern tools and reviving production processes rooted in various crafts that are being superseded by technical automation. They break with tradition by combining their media with incongruous motifs: the entrails, animal parts, or human limbs, for example, that seem to grow from massive oaken chests and cabinets make for a sight that is as amusing as it is disconcerting.Humans, animals, and plants coalesce into a bizarre and sensual new creation in works that exude the conviction that the same lifeblood courses through all beings and manifests itself even in the cut and dressed wood or marble block. Displacing forms out of their original contexts and assembling them in fanciful hybrids, Dewar &amp; Gicquel produce absurd objects—glimpses, like chimeras or the creatures of legend, of an alternate reality.At the Secession, Dewar &amp; Gicquel present altogether sixteen works, extending the series of oakwood sculptures they began in 2017. They are hybrids in several respects: between sculpture and furniture, between au tonomous work of art and object of utility, between inanimate object and animate creature—human, animal, and plant. The massive oakwood objects are studded with intricately carved and meticulously executed grotesque figurative elements such as arms, noses, gourds, courgettes, and oxen and pig heads that seem to grow out of the chests, cabinets, and dressers. The artists describe their most recent sculptures as a “rendezvous of animals of different species and a range of vegetables (…) as mammalian fantasies and pastoral hallucinations.” These works, some of which make their debut in the show, are complemented by a 2015 series of handmade ceramic sculptures that emulate off-the-shelf sanitary ware and introduce the discourse of specific materials as well as the varied artistic play with the commonplace and banal to the exhibition. The duo’s engagement with the codes, traditions, and conventions of art as well as their mischievous humor speak even from their most inconspicuous pieces. Daniel Dewar was born in Forest of Dean (GB) in 1976 and lives and works in Brussels.Grégory Gicquel was born in Saint-Brieuc (FR) in 1975 and lives and works in Plévenon (FR).On occasion of the exhibition an artist’s book by Daniel Dewar &amp; Grégory Gicquel is published.

Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel

Beethoven’s 9th Symphony

Composition of the Frieze

The 14th Exhibition 1902

Gesamtkunstwerk

The Beethoven Frieze is one of the main works of European Art Nouveau. This work, created by Gustav Klimt, is divided into three wall parts: two light sidewalls and a dark middle part.

Beethoven Frieze

Restauration of the Frieze

History of the Frieze

Gustav Klimt

For Gustav Klimt, the Beethoven Frieze marked the beginning of the “golden period." With this style, Klimt became the most important painter of his generation in Vienna. Today, Gustav Klimt is considered the main representative of Viennese Art Nouveau – as this cultural and historical epoch was called in Europe around 1900. As a founding member and first president of the Secession, he shaped the Austrian style that became known as the "Secession style."

Grafisches Kabinett

The figure group of Marc Anton is below the window. This sculpture was made by Arthur Strasser for the Paris World's Fair in 1900. The chariot of the Roman general is pulled by lions and panthers. The lazy and complacent Marc Anton can also be understood as a symbol of the decadence of historicism.

2020 Secession is happy to present Yuji Agematsu’s day-to-day collection of urban detritus finds turned into miniature sculptural formations from the entire 2020 calendar year. Displayed in custom-made acrylic glass shelves that represent monthly calendar&nbsp; sheets,&nbsp; and&nbsp; alongside&nbsp; diary&nbsp; entry&nbsp; notebooks,&nbsp; his 2020 zips offer a fresh and decidedly unique review of a most remarkable year.Yuji&nbsp; Agematsu&nbsp; is&nbsp; a&nbsp; kind&nbsp; of&nbsp; chronicler&nbsp; of&nbsp; our&nbsp; times and, moreover, he can be considered an experimental cartographer and archivist of only seemingly petty findings from the streets of his hometown. An urban flaneur, Agematsu has taken daily walks through the streets of New York ever since he moved there from Japan in the early 1980s. On this daily routine, which has now been part of his artistic practice for more than a quarter-century, he picks up and scrutinizes litter that attracts his attention—bits of paper, gum, scraps of plastic bags or wrappers, a feather, in short: otherwise overlooked evidence of the hustle and bustle of city life. If found worth collecting, he drops the find into a cellophane sleeve of a cigarette packet (a container the artist names “zips”) and notes date, time and exact location of the item’s discovery in a small diary. Back&nbsp; in&nbsp; his&nbsp; studio,&nbsp; the&nbsp; found&nbsp; discarded&nbsp; materials undergo a process of composing, securing, organizing and cataloguing: the artist waits and reworks a chosen discovery before fixing it with resin—one micro-sculpture a day—and in doing so accumulates a continually growing archive of miniature&nbsp; readymade&nbsp; still&nbsp; lifes&nbsp; that&nbsp; is&nbsp; structured&nbsp; by&nbsp; day,&nbsp; month, year. The objects are dated and presented on acrylic glass shelves or more protective acrylic glass boxes that encapsulate a complete month’s findings where they are arranged in orderly rows, following the pattern of the related calendar sheet. The strict and discreet presentation format allows all attention to be focused on the idiosyncratic and fascinating objects, which are—first and foremost—sculptural organizations comprised of overlooked city waste. Yuji Agematsu, born in 1956 in Kanagawa, Japan, lives and works in New York.The artist’s book Yuji Agematsu. Four Seasons is available in the Secession shop (EUR 35,-).

Yuji Agematsu

Upcoming Exhibitions: 21. November 2020 – 31. Januar 2021 Danh Vō | Lawrence Abu Hamdan | Till Megerle Permanent Presentation: Gustav Klimt – The Beethoven Frieze (1902) 
 Gustav Klimt designed the famous Beethoven Frieze for the XIV. Exhibition of the Austrian Secession Association of Visual Artists that ran from 15 April to 27 June 1902. The idea of the Secessionist gesamtkunstwerk [all-embracing art work] was realized in this exhibition which was conceived of as a homage to the composer, Ludwig van Beethoven.

Tour Through the Vienna Secession

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