Museum Liaunig

The Museum Liaunig stands in Neuhaus in southern Austria’s province of Kärnten. It is a private museum of contemporary art opened in 2008 to display the collection of Herbert W. Liaunig, an industrialist and art collector who died in 2023. Since 2018 his son Peter Liaunig, an architect, has run the institution. The building was designed by the Vienna firm querkraft after an earlier plan by Odile Decq was abandoned. The collection numbers about 2,500 works, of which roughly 300 are shown at any one time. It is regarded as one of the largest holdings of Austrian art from 1950 onwards, with pieces by Arnulf Rainer, Maria Lassnig, Hans Bischoffshausen and others. A separate underground wing presents the ‘Gold der Akan’ display of 600 African gold objects from the Ashanti, Baule and Ebrie peoples, one of the world’s four largest such collections. Visitors enter below ground level and climb through a depot of some 600 m² to the main painting and sculpture wing. This long white cube has a 160-metre corridor only 13 metres wide and seven metres high, lit by strips of glass along its concrete U-shell. At one end the building juts 30 metres over the slope, offering a terrace toward the road. Beyond the foyer a new triangular space hosts temporary exhibitions and events, while a 50-metre passage leads to a glass and miniature collection and a sculpture hall with five-second reverberation. A landscaped sculpture garden is being added into the hillside.