August Walla was born in Klosterneuburg in 1936 and died there in 2001, having spent decades making work of extraordinary density and originality. In 2026, twenty-five years after his death and in what would have been his 90th birthday year, the City Museum of Klosterneuburg is dedicating a memorial exhibition to him. The title comes from Walla himself: Klosterneuburg is my most beautiful paradise.
At its heart are his letters and photographs, and a lifelong love for the town he never really left.
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On October 13, 2026, Johann Feilacher received one of Austria’s highest state honours: the Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft und Kunst der Republik Österreich, the Cross of Honour for Science and Art, awarded in the name of the Federal President of the Republic of Austria.
Feilacher joined Gugging in 1983 as Leo Navratil’s assistant. He took over in 1986 and spent four decades building the Art Brut Centre that gave galerie gugging its foundation. In 2000 he separated the artists’ community from the psychiatric clinic entirely, giving the artists a home built around their practice. Together with Nina Katschnig, he opened museum gugging in 2006. He retired in 2022.
What he left behind is not simply an institution. It is a model for how art, dignity, and community can exist in the same place at the same time.
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This month, Michel Nedjar's film Capitale-paysage screens at MoMA in New York. Leopold Strobl is in their permanent collection. Two galerie gugging artists. One of the most important museums in the world. This is not a coincidence. It is the result of over thirty years of building something real, in a small village outside Vienna, that is now shaping the conversation at the highest levels of the art world.
