Parallel Vienna 2026: Vienna's Alternative Art Fair Returns to the Otto Wagner Areal .

Parallel Vienna: 10 Artists to Visit During the Alternative Art Fair

Parallel Vienna returns to the Otto Wagner Areal from September 9 to 13, 2026, its fourteenth edition inside the former hospital's wards and corridors.

This year, Catapult Contemporary asked a group of exhibiting artists for one specific thing: a short statement on the room they are presenting entirely on their own.

What came back were a handful of lines each, written in the days before installation. This is not the full walkthrough.

It is enough to know what is behind a given door, and a reason to go find the rest of it in person. For the fair's dates, address and general shape, see Catapult's Parallel Vienna 2026 overview.

Ten Artists, Nine Self-Programmed Rooms

Every Artist Statement presentation below belongs to one artist alone. What follows is what each of them chose to say about it, unedited beyond length.

Baurjan Aralov

Aralov works in painting, treating memory as material rather than record; his canvases pull faded fragments back into view and let them shift under a second look.

"Baurjan Aralov's work explores the relationship between memory and perception. Painting becomes a way of retrieving images and fragments that have faded, allowing them to resurface and transform.

His works approach memory not as a fixed record of the past, but as something continuously reconstructed in the present."

Instagram: @baurjanaralov Pavillon 7, Room 101

Rui Cao

Rui Cao paints flesh in crowds; for her first Parallel Vienna Artist Statement she's given the whole room over to it, walls and floor both.

"I named my project Piggy Farm. I put two of my paintings, I LOVE U and Bon Appétit, on the wall, and covered the whole floor with dirt, then placed my other work, Zamilované Maso (broken version), on it."

Instagram: @ruicaorui Room

Yeji Seok

Seok works across 3D-printed relief sculpture, painting and video, translating bodily presence and emotional tension into forms that sit between the pictorial and the sculptural.

Excerpted from the artist's statement, "Night Bodies" (written in the third person, not the artist's own "I"-voice): "In the silence of the night, forms shed their everyday definitions; bodies become landscapes of fragmented intimacy, raw weight, and unresolved narratives. [...]

The practice stems from an experimentation with the 'in-between state' between pictorial flatness and sculptural volume. The figures carry familiar bodily contours yet never fully reveal all their dimensions, resting ambiguously within a liminal threshold of space."

Instagram: @seokyeji_

Hendrick Dialer

Hendrick Dialer paints the in-between: airports, corridors, bureaucratic objects, the transitional spaces where function and perception start to blur.

"My artistic work moves between places A and B, in an intermediate space that I call 'AB' and experience as a lived route.

I am interested in those places and moments where movement, function, and perception intertwine: airports, train stations, vehicles, corridors, toy stores, bureaucratic objects, and technical constructions."

Instagram: @hendrick.dialer Pavillon 7, Room 220

Lisa Breyer

Breyer's paintings put figures through decisions, coincidences and doubt, working from drawing, art-historical reference and consumer culture toward images that stay unresolved on purpose.

Translated from the artist's German original: "This raises questions of self-discovery, relationships, and how a life can be thought within a contradictory present. I understand painting as a form of hope in the act of doing, a caring practice that requires openness and close looking, and allows for tenderness."

Instagram: @lisa__breyer Pavillon 7, Room 304

Katharina Huemer

Huemer's oil paintings and life-size drawings, developed in part during a New York residency, sit close to ordinary social situations until they stop feeling ordinary.

"Dämmerschlaf brings together oil paintings and life-size drawings that deal with the appearance of ordinary social situations.

The works explore proximity, power, voyeurism, and the fragile threshold between wakefulness and loss of control, set against the historical, clinical architecture of PARALLEL Vienna."

Instagram: @katharinahue Pavillon 7, Room 107

Florine Imo

Florin Imo paints and sculpts women who are having a good time inside images built to contain them, from witches and princesses to Bad Girls and girlbosses, and lets the contradictions run loose.

"For PARALLEL VIENNA 2026, one of these women leaves the canvas entirely. Fuck This, I'm Leaving, a life-size mixed-media sculpture, places her on a pink motorcycle with police lights flashing in its mirrors. She is escaping something, but she makes no attempt to disappear."

Instagram: @florineimo Pavillon 7, Room 301, 3rd floor

Emma Peinhopf

Peinhopf shows Take Your Time (MDF, assembly adhesive, screws, ceramic, 2026) and Cart to Table (colored pencil and pencil on paper, 2026).

Instagram: @emmpsen Pavillon 7, Room 307

Melanie Thöni

Thöni combines familiar Alpine imagery, mountains, animals, customs, rural labor, with mythology, personal memory and contemporary digital aesthetics, and uses it to ask questions of femininity, identity and belonging.

"Between weather forecast and image of home, small disturbances begin to emerge. The landscape becomes a space of observation, while the women inhabiting it become figures who do not simply submit to the gaze."

Instagram: @mellithoeni Pavillon 7, Room 113

Lukas Weithas

Weithas works across sculpture, installation and performance, engaging rural aesthetics and festival/tent culture as social structures where belonging and exclusion become visible.

Instagram: @lukasweithas Room K013

Ten rooms, Ten ways of using four public days inside a building that was never meant for art.

The point of showing this little is the same as the point of the fair itself. Walk through it yourself, Thursday to Sunday, September 10 to 13, Otto Wagner Areal.

More on Instagram Catapult Contemporary

Parallel Vienna doesn't dress up. No booths, no polish - exhibitors take over rooms in a former psychiatric hospital and work with whatever the architecture gives them.

That roughness is the point: it's Vienna's answer to the fair season's more polished stops, and its reputation as an alternative rests entirely on staying unfinished on purpose.

For its 14th edition, the fair returns to the Otto Wagner Areal for a fourth straight year — familiar ground, but never a repeat. Corridors, wards and stairwells get reassigned each September, and the artists filling them shift with them.

Impressions From Five Years at the Otto Wagner Areal

Catapult has walked these halls every year since 2021, first as Munchies Art Club, now as Catapult. What we look for hasn't changed: not just who's showing, but which room stops you mid-step

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