Photographing KAWS Art & Comix at Albertina Modern Wien 2026
In short: KAWS. Art & Comix runs April 3 - September 27, 2026 at Albertina Modern in Wien. 192 works across 27 historical and contemporary artist positions, curated by Angela Stief (Director and Chief Curator) together with Florian Waldvogel.
She was giving an introductory talk about the exhibition and how it came to be. Listening to her made you feel her passion for the exhibited artists.
Highlights include one of only two Keith Haring Pop Shop Tokyo instances in the world and Red Grooms' walk-in Ruckus Manhattan: Subway (1975–76).
This post documents my impressions of the show - especially the small visual jokes and juxtapositions a catalogue can't. My full gallery can be found at my Gallery Website.
I walked through on April 22 during the "KAWS & Create" evening. 90 minutes, one camera, and the distinct feeling that the exhibition halls themselves were vibrating. I trained myself to see the things most visitors walk past. So this post is less a review than a documentation - it highlights the tiny visual one-liners the exhibition accidentally creates once you stop looking at the pieces and start looking at the environment and interactions with visitors.
Visitors at the KAWS exhibition at Albertina
A Tour with a Pencil in Your Hand
The tour was organised for members of the Albertina Creator Hub, and this time it came with a lovely twist: at the entrance, everyone was handed a small drawing board and a pencil (yes, that ancient analog tool!) so we could sketch our own impressions as we went. A museum tour where you're encouraged to make instead of just look is a genuinely rare thing - it gives the Creator Hub its name in the most literal sense and also fits a show about comics perfectly.
The Albertina invited you to draw your own version
Some people in the group produced seriously good drawings; others (like myself) mostly mostly stood behind their camera and taking photos and videos.
A Cast of Usual and Unusual Suspects
The artist list reads like a greatest-hits compilation of everything that ever ate into or was eaten by commercial visual culture:
KAWS - the gravitational centre
Keith Haring
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Roy Lichtenstein
Öyvind Fahlström
Officially, the show puts KAWS in dialogue with 27 historical and contemporary artist positions.
Keith Haring's Pop Shop Tokyo at Albertina Modern - One of Only Two in the World
What fascinated me alot was the Pop Shop Tokyo room by Keith Haring with his signature line drawings carpeting the floor, walls, and ceiling in black and white which you can walk into. A glowing POP SHOP light box. A Maneki-neko (waving cat) sculpture in the middle. Walking in feels like stepping inside a Haring drawing at 1:1 scale. Here's the fun fact: only two such Pop Shop Tokyo installations exist in the world, and one of them is sitting in Vienna right now.
Keith Haring's Pop Shop Tokyo
Keith Haring's Pop Shop Tokyo - enhanced
Exhibition Sections and Speech-Bubble Curation
One of the clever structural moves is the overhead comic-speech-bubble banners that mark each section. They behave like comic panels - you read the room the way you'd read a page:
THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN - Katherine Bernhardt's giant Pink Panther paintings paired with black reclining KAWS BFF sculptures. Cartoon meets sculpture meets scale.
UNCANNY ENCOUNTERS - large paintings of a detached, glowering Mickey Mouse head (one turquoise, one magenta). Mickey as a horror motif. This room is unsettling in exactly the right way.
Uncanny Encounters
FÜRCHTET EUCH NICHT! ("Fear Not!") - paintings where comic-book conventions collide with Latin and German religious iconography. Crucifixions and speech bubbles in the same frame.
Fürchtet euch nicht!
DER AUFSTAND DER ZEICHEN ("The Uprising of Signs") - the thesis section, essentially. What does it mean when signs - comic signs, brand signs, street signs - become art-historical subjects?
The Hidden Jokes Only an Attentive Visitor Sees
Part of my job photographing cultural institutions is spotting the accidents - the visual one-liners a big show creates the moment you stop looking at the works and start looking at the *room*. KAWS. Art & Comix is full of them. A few that stopped me:
The exhibition accidentally violating its own caption.
Exit: This way!
Mirroring²
Look closely!
The Stark Contrast - Two Exhibitions, Same Building, Opposite Universes
The KAWS show is happening in the same building as Tanzbild , the dance-photography exhibition I wrote about earlier this month. Same museum. Same ticket desk. Wildly different planets. Tanzbild is 120 small black-and-white prints from the 1860s to the 1940s that ask you to lean in close and be quiet; KAWS is 192 room-sized, neon-coloured works from the 1960s to now that hit you from ten metres away. Tanzbild is the exhibition that whispers, and KAWS is the exhibition that screams. Both are doing something honest. Both reward attention.
Practical Info
Where: Albertina Modern, Karlsplatz 5, 1010 Wien
When: April 3 - September 27, 2026 (open daily 10:00–18:00)
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