Museum of Art Fakes, Art museum in Landstraße, Vienna, Austria
Museum of Art Fakes is an art museum in Vienna dedicated to displaying forgeries and replicas created by famous counterfeiters. The collection documents the techniques and strategies behind these works and shows how experts overlooked them or held them as genuine for years.
The museum was founded in 2005 by Diana Grober and Christian Rastner in the Landstraße district. The pair began collecting after meeting the art forger Edgar Mrugalla, who donated the first works. It is privately run and describes itself as the world's only genuine art forgery museum.
The name directly refers to the museum's focus on showing works by forgers who attempted to imitate famous artists. Visitors can observe how these imitations ended up hanging in museums and collections, reflecting the everyday reality of the art market.
The museum sits next to the Hundertwasser House, making the location easy to find. The spaces are manageable in size, so you can move through all the exhibits without rushing and focus on the details of each work.
Tom Keating hid "time bombs" in his paintings: a layer of glycerine beneath the paint that dissolved when the work was cleaned or restored, exposing the forgery. The museum's first pieces were donated by forger Edgar Mrugalla after the founders met him.
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