The Vienna Actionism Museum will end its exhibition programme in 2027 and become a research institution open to the public by appointment only, its shareholders announced, after months of protest over its show devoted to Otto Muehl, an artist convicted in 1991 of sexually abusing minors in the commune he led. The museum said the moral condemnation of Muehl now overshadows his artistic legacy, making further exhibitions of his work untenable.

The privately owned museum opened in 2024 as a home for Vienna Actionism, the postwar movement whose performers used blood, excrement and the body itself as material. Its current exhibition, "Otto Muehl: Art at the Abyss", opened on 10 September and runs until 10 January 2027. Muehl led a commune through the 1970s and 1980s and was convicted in 1991 of crimes including the sexual abuse of minors living there. After his release in 1997 he returned to the art world, and his market rose after his death in 2014.

The Muehl show reignited the argument over how his work should be presented, particularly after survivors of the commune spoke out. Mathilda, a group led by former commune members, called on the museum to divest financially from Muehl's work and on the Austrian government to investigate how the commune operated with impunity for nearly two decades. In September, protesters gathered outside the museum with banners calling Muehl a paedophile criminal and cult leader and the building a perpetrator's museum.

Former commune members have described the human cost behind the work. Ruth Bourgogne has said Muehl's "Sliding Pictures" were made by painting on the bodies of girls he had sexually abused and dragging them across the canvas, adding that the pictures look beautiful but the suffering is inside them. Another former member has spoken of being abused from the age of three and of watching a nude photograph taken of her at 12 sold at a Viennese auction house. The museum says the sliding works are not in the exhibition, which contains only work made before the commune was founded in 1970, and that it does not sell paintings.