Collection and Archive

Deputy Heads: OR Silvia Herkt, MA, BA & Sen. Sc. Mag. Stefanie Kitzberger

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Kindly note our closure period from December 1, 2025 – May 31, 2026 
Due to extensive collection maintenance, Collection and Archive of the University of Applied Arts Vienna will suspend its services (research inquiries, processing of loan and reproduction requests, support for researchers, guided tours, a.o.) from December 1, 2025, to May 31, 2026.

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The Collection and Archive institute conceives of itself as both the material memory of the University of Applied Arts Vienna and an instrument for its continuing development. Its work combines portfolio maintenance, exhibition making, documentation, research, and teaching.
Founded in 1980 on the initiative of the artist and then-rector Oswald Oberhuber as a teaching collection to encourage artistic practice among students, the institute is today just as public-facing as it is directed toward intra-university structures. The Collection and Archive holdings are regularly presented as loans on the international stage. They document the institutional history of the University since its founding in 1867 as the School of Arts and Crafts of the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum for Art and Industry, the diverse artistic developments of Viennese Modernism, and the transnational careers and networks of the protagonists connected with the University of Applied Arts. As objects of exhibition and research, the holdings play a significant role in the dialogue between the University and the greater public. The institute presents them in a variety of formats, ranging from specialist consulting, exhibition conception and design, courses, conferences, talk series, publications, and editions, to cooperations with artists, other institutes and departments of the University of Applied Arts, and international partners.

At the heart of all its initiatives, a university of art is engaged in the continuous renegotiation of the very concept of art. We understand our work as an actualizing, recontextualizing, and experimental practice – one that facilitates new, critical perspectives and renders visible previously suppressed positions. In all our projects, we aim to shape contemporary discourse and contribute to the University of Applied Arts Vienna’ position in both the international field of art and contemporary society. Alongside the acquisition of artistic works and primary sources, we support and develop new productions with a connection to the institute’s key areas of focus. These include the historiography of Viennese Modernism and the processing of the University’s history – particularly with an intersectional reference to women’s and gender history; the field of tension between applied and fine art; the exhibition as artistic form; the examination of structural conditions of the marginalization of designers and artists; the relationship between a work and its documentation; and seemingly subordinate forms of production and collaborative work.


Collection Holdings
The collection currently holds numerous objects from all areas of applied and fine arts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly from Viennese Modernism. These include drawings, posters, furniture, textiles, photographs, ceramic pieces, paintings, objects, and architectural models by Fred Adlmüller, Friedrich Berzeviczy-Pallavicini, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Josef Hoffmann, Gertrud Höchsmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Anton Kolig, Adele List, Bertold Löffler, Elly Niebuhr, Otto Niedermoser, Oswald Oberhuber, Victor J. Papanek, Franz Schuster, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Peter Weibel, Emmy Zweybrück, the Wiener Werkstätte, and Vienna Kineticism, as well as Baroque and domestic-industry textiles from the historical teaching material collections of Carl Karger and Rosalia Rothansl, and from the private collection of Mileva Stoisavjlevic-Roller.