Vienna is marking what would have been Franz West's eightieth birthday with two exhibitions opening together across Karlsplatz. The larger of them, Franz West: The Revolution of Sculpture, opened at the Albertina Modern on 6 November 2026 and runs to 29 March 2027, while the Wien Museum presents Franz West and Vienna alongside it.

West, who lived from 1947 to 2012, built a career out of refusing to keep sculpture on a pedestal. In the 1970s, working in the shadow of Viennese Actionism, he devised his Adaptives — odd, prosthesis-like objects meant to be worn, held and pressed against the body. They only made sense once someone picked them up, and that exchange between object and person became the core of his practice. From there his work spread into furniture, collage, posters and architectural installations, with sitting down treated as part of the artwork itself.

The retrospective covers the full arc of that career, from the early Adaptives through pieces such as the Wegener Rooms from 1988, Larrey Rue from 1986, Symbol of Sexuality from 1999 to 2000, Sisyphos and Two Lemures from 2002, and the Uncle Chair made between 2003 and 2007. It also includes collaborations with friends including Heimo Zobernig, Herbert Brandl and Otto Zitko, and loans from lenders such as the ESSL Collection, the Haselsteiner Family Collection, the Hall Art Foundation, the Luma Foundation and Sammlung Grässlin.

West was one of Austria's most internationally recognised artists, shown at multiple editions of documenta and the Venice Biennale, where he received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in 2011. The twin exhibitions in Vienna underline how firmly his home city has claimed him: the Albertina show surveys the work itself, while the Wien Museum exhibition traces how the city shaped it from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

The Albertina Modern show is on view at Karlsplatz in Vienna, and the companion exhibition at the Wien Museum, a few steps away on the same square, continues to 2 May 2027.