Contemporary art takes London and Paris by storm as collectors wheel and deal at the Frieze and FIAC art fairs, and the Turner Prize nominees exhibit in the British capital. Fashion and impressionism meet in Paris, Belgium hosts a new exhibition on human rights and Spain holds an Architecture Week offering a look inside some of Madrid’s historic buildings. Following is a selection of what’s on in Europe in October.

Austria

Art: Dan Flavin made a name with sculptures and installations made of a single, soulless material: fluorescent lights. Vienna’s Modern Art Museum is staging Austria’s first exhibition on the late US artist, with 30 works spanning his career, created with neon tubes of various colours and classic light bulbs.

Dan Flavin. Lights runs from October 13 to February 3.

www.mumok.at

Food/Culture: Not to be upstaged by neighbour Germany, Austria is celebrating its own version of the Oktoberfest with the second Wiener Wiesn Festival, held at the foot of Vienna’s iconic Ferris wheel.

Austrian food, traditional outfits, music and, of course, litres of beer will be on the programme from until October 7.

www.wienerwiesn.at

Britain

Art: London’s Tate Britain hosts exhibitions by the four artists shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for the visual arts in Europe.

Spartacus Chetwynd, Luke Fowler, Paul Noble and Elizabeth Price are this year’s nominees for the often-controversial award, which is presented to an artist under 50, living, working or born in Britain for an outstanding exhibition in the previous year.

Runs from tomorrow to January 2013.

www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/turner-prize-2012

Art: The international art community descends on London’s Regents Park for the annual Frieze Art Fair, one of contemporary art’s leading trade shows which celebrates its 10th edition this year.

Although primarily a chance for artists and more than 170 leading commercial galleries to woo wealthy collectors, the fair has become a major date in London's art calendar, attracting over 60,000 visitors last year.

Runs from October 11 to 14.

www.friezelondon.com

Norway

Photography: The Nobel Peace Centre puts on show a series of photographs of Mahatma Gandhi taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson, the last photographer to immortalise the Nobel Peace laureate before his assassination on January 30, 1948.

Until February 17.

www.nobelpeacecenter.org

Italy

Art: Eight paintings by renowned Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), who has just 34 works attributed to his name in existence, will go on display in the Scuderie del Quirinale museum in central Rome until January 20.

The works, including his famous paintings The Little Street, Saint Praxedis and The Girl With a Glass of Wine, will hang alongside paintings by Vermeer’s peers Carel Fabritius, Pieter de Hooch, Emmanuel de Witt.

www.scuderiequirinale.it

Belgium

Festival: Belgium pays homage to its large Moroccan community with a festival until January, gathering some 150 singers, dancers and writers both from across the Mediterranean and from Belgium to highlight Morocco’s “cultural and artistic modernity”.

Among guests at Daba Maroc are writer Abdellatif Laabi, dancer Said Ait el Moumen and singer Fatima Tabaamrant.

Art/Human Rights: Newtopia, featuring works by 70 known and upcoming artists, describes itself as the first major international contemporary art exhibition on human rights.

Some of the artists are from countries where freedom of expression remains a challenge, such as Syria or Russia, and include renowned artists such as China’s Ai Weiwei, Belarussian Marina Naprushkina, Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat, Argentina’s Eduardo Gil and Britain’s Simon Starling. In the town of Malines, halfway between Brussels and Antwerp, until December 10.

www.newtopia.be

France

Art/Fashion: You can almost hear the dresses rustle as you walk by. A major new Paris show explores how the impressionist painters captured the dawn of modern fashion at the end of the 19th century.

More than 70 masterworks by Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir or Edgar Degas go on show beside some 40 outfits dated 1860-1885, all swishing gowns and corseted waists, on loan from Paris’ Galliera fashion museum.

Impressionism and Fashion runs until January 20.

www.museeorsay.fr/en/events/now-on.html

Art: Collectors and art lovers alike will converge on Paris’s ornate Grand Palais exhibition hall as the FIAC contemporary art fair brings together 180 galleries from 24 countries.

For its 39th year FIAC is ex­panding its parallel outdoor programme – which drew half a million visitors last year – with exhibits, performances and film screenings in the Tuileries Gardens or the tropical greenhouses of the Jardin des Plantes.

Runs from October 18 to 21.

www.fiac.com/?lg=en

Spain

Architecture: Architecture Week offers the public a look inside some of Madrid’s varied and distinctive historic buildings, with tours, exhibitions and visits run by the COAM Archi­tecture Foundation.

Highlights include peeks into the crypt of San Sebastian church and the landmark Picasso Tower, designed by the late US architect Minoru Yamasaki.

The activities run from today until Sunday.

www.coam.org

Art: The French post-impressionist master Paul Gauguin comes to Madrid in a major exhibition including works painted during his retreat to Tahiti in the South Pacific.

Gauguin and the Voyage to the Exotic begins with Gauguin’s travels and examines notions of the exotic and the primitive through later works of Matisse, Kandinsky, Klee and others.

The exhibition opens on October 9 and runs until January 13.

www.museothyssen.org

The Netherlands

Art: Some 40 art galleries and design studios from around the globe including the Netherlands, France, Spain and China are to converge on The Hague to exhibit the work of their artists at the seventh annual ARTI arts fair, held at the city’s historical Fokker Terminal.

The event runs from Wednesday to Sunday.

http://artidenhaag.nl