VIENNA.- The ALBERTINA is celebrating its 250th anniversary with Sammeln für die Zukunft — Collecting for the Future, a major exhibition that looks back at the museum’s origins while asking what it means to build a collection for generations still to come.

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On view from June 19 through October 11, 2026, in the Propter Homines Hall, the exhibition brings together around 90 works, including drawings, prints and objects from the museum’s holdings, alongside a new work by the artist Rosa Barba created especially for the anniversary. Curated by Ralph Gleis and Christof Metzger, the exhibition presents the ALBERTINA not only as one of the world’s great art collections, but as a living institution shaped by changing ideas of knowledge, preservation, access and public responsibility.

The story begins in July 1776, when Conte Giacomo Durazzo, the Austrian envoy in Venice, presented Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen and Archduchess Marie Christine of Habsburg-Lorraine with a group of 10,000 copper engravings. That moment marked the beginning of what would become the ALBERTINA’s world-famous collection. It also took place at a turning point in history: the age of Enlightenment, the eve of the French Revolution, and the same year in which the American colonies declared independence.

From that intellectual climate emerged a collection founded on the belief that art should be preserved, studied and passed on. Two and a half centuries later, the ALBERTINA holds around 1.2 million works, ranging from drawings and prints to photography, painting, sculpture, installation and media art.

The anniversary exhibition revisits the museum’s history by asking deceptively simple questions: Who collected? What was collected? How were works stored, displayed and made accessible? These questions lead not only into the story of Duke Albert, after whom the museum is named, but also into the role of Marie Christine, whose fortune made many acquisitions possible and whose own passion for art helped shape the collection from the beginning.





Among the works highlighted in the exhibition are some of the ALBERTINA’s most celebrated treasures, including Albrecht Dürer’s Feldhase, or Young Hare, the 1502 watercolor that has become the museum’s best-known image. The show also traces how masterpieces by artists such as Rembrandt, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hieronymus Bosch, Michelangelo, Peter Paul Rubens, Maria Sibylla Merian, Caspar David Friedrich, Édouard Manet, Emil Nolde and Egon Schiele entered the collection over time.

The exhibition also examines how the ALBERTINA evolved from an aristocratic private graphic collection into a public museum. In its early decades, the collection was built largely around works on paper, especially prints and drawings. A major turning point came in 1796, when approximately 530 drawings from the imperial court library entered the collection through an exchange. Among them were extraordinary sheets by older masters, including Dürer’s famous Young Hare, which remains one of the institution’s greatest treasures.

The 19th century brought further growth, public access and scholarly study. The name “Albertina” itself first appeared in documented use in 1864. By the late 19th century, the museum was already expanding its public role, creating exhibition displays and making reproductions of its holdings available. The first season of regular exhibitions, in 1899–1900, was devoted to Dürer; more than 600 exhibitions have followed since.

The 20th century brought dramatic changes. After the fall of the Habsburg monarchy, the ALBERTINA entered state ownership in 1920, a transformation described in the exhibition as a kind of second founding. From that point onward, the institution increasingly opened itself to a broad public, developing from a specialized graphic collection into one of the world’s leading museums.

At the same time, the exhibition does not treat the museum’s history as a closed chapter. Its title, Collecting for the Future, points to the responsibility of collecting today. A museum, the exhibition suggests, is never complete. To collect means to preserve the past, respond to the present and imagine what future audiences may need to understand.

This idea is explored in a new work by Rosa Barba, commissioned for the anniversary. Her film Private Metaphysics looks behind the scenes of the ALBERTINA and turns the museum itself into the subject. Working with film, light, space and sculptural elements, Barba reflects on the ways museums order, protect and reinterpret the past. Her work addresses questions that are especially urgent for institutions today: how collections are preserved, how new media change museum practices, and how visibility itself shapes the experience of art.

Barba’s related installation Drawing in Space continues these concerns, bringing together filmic and sculptural elements in a meditation on time, movement and perception. The idea of drawing in space also connects back to the ALBERTINA’s historic core as a graphic collection, linking the moving image to the line, the trace and the fragile materiality of art.

A richly illustrated catalogue, Sammeln für die Zukunft, edited by Ralph Gleis and Christof Metzger, accompanies the exhibition. Published in German and English, the 328-page volume is available through the ALBERTINA shop.

With Collecting for the Future, the ALBERTINA uses its anniversary not simply to celebrate its past, but to consider what kind of museum it must become. The exhibition presents collecting as an act of memory, care and responsibility — an inheritance from the past, but also a promise to the future.