Vienna Loses Two More Galleries as Collector Base Thins Out

Vienna's gallery scene has lost two more dealers: Exile is closing after roughly 18 years, and Zeller van Almsick is shuttering after a decade, both citing high costs and unreliable sales, The Art Newspaper (TAN) reports. The news brings the count of Vienna galleries closing or radically restructuring in recent months to four.

The wave started in October, when Zurich dealer Eva Presenhuber announced she would close the Vienna outpost she has operated since 2022, as she told ARTnews. Emanuel Layr followed in September, revealing he would change his operating model.

Why are the galleries closing?

Exile founder Christian Siekmeier put it bluntly to TAN: "there are simply no new collectors emerging." He founded the gallery in Berlin in 2008 and moved it to Vienna after a decade there. Its program ranged across generations — older artists such as Alvin Baltrop and Nathalie du Pasquier alongside younger names like David Gruber and Katharina Marszewski.

Zeller van Almsick's cofounder Magdalena Zeller was just as direct. "There is no point in sugarcoating the fact that the past two years have been financially extremely challenging," she told TAN. The gallery built its reputation on younger Austrian artists including Dejan Dukic, Carsten Fock, and Bianca Phos.

Layr, for his part, is not closing — he's going nomadic while keeping a smaller, by-appointment showroom in Vienna. He mounted his first show in 2011 and represents artists including Julien Bismuth, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, and Leah Ke Yi Zheng. Back in September he insisted "financial reasons played no part" in the decision, adding that "the gallery model as we know it is increasingly reaching its limits." His arithmetic has since become more candid. "It's harder to sell some things, costs are getting higher, then there's a big art fair coming and taking another €100,000," he now tells TAN. "I had to be more realistic, and think, 'How much profit do I get? How much does the artist get?'"

What does this change for Vienna's art scene?

The puzzle is that Vienna looks, on paper, like a thriving art city. Its metro area holds 2.9 million people and is dense with institutions, historical and contemporary alike — enough that Art in America's Emily Watlington, after a dozen visits, called it "Europe's best art city" in 2025. Yet Zeller tells TAN there is "a significant gap" between the city's cultural heft and the level of activity among its collectors.

Longtime collector Eva Frey puts numbers on that gap, at least by generation. She tells TAN there aren't enough collectors in her own age cohort, over 70, to sustain the city's galleries. Nor are there enough in the 45-to-55 bracket that formerly formed the principal group supporting contemporary art — people, in her words, who are "established in a profession."

The market is not without signals of life. A group of top Vienna galleries banded together to launch a new fair, Astoria Artshow, which held its inaugural edition in September. That effort followed troubles at both the Spark Art Fair Vienna and Vienna Contemporary. Whether a dealer-run fair can rebuild a buyer base that four galleries could not count on is the question Vienna's remaining dealers will now be watching.