Mural Harbor, Linz — A Chrome Drop in the Industrial Harbor

In 2024, I travelled to Linz, Austria, to paint at Mural Harbor, one of Europe’s major open-air destinations for large-scale graffiti and mural art.

What makes Mural Harbor special is the setting. This is not a traditional gallery or a former industrial building converted into a museum. It is an active harbor environment, with warehouses, cranes, containers, railway infrastructure and large industrial structures becoming the canvas for artists from around the world. The project started in 2014 and has grown into a huge collection of more than 300 murals by artists from around 40 countries.

For my intervention, I wanted to work directly with the architecture rather than simply place an image on a wall.

The idea was to create the illusion of a chrome drop emerging from a vertical structure of the building. By using perspective, reflections, highlights and deep shadows, the flat architectural surface becomes something that appears to project into the real space.

This is where anamorphic painting becomes particularly interesting. The architecture is no longer just the background of the mural — it becomes part of the illusion itself.

The result is a very clean and contemporary intervention. The reflective chrome surface contrasts with the raw industrial character of the harbor, creating a visual effect that changes considerably depending on where you stand.

For me, this project was particularly interesting because the anamorphic effect worked extremely well with the architecture. The chrome drop feels almost like a contemporary object attached to the building, while at the right viewpoint the painted surface starts to disappear and the illusion takes over.

It is exactly this relationship between painting, perspective and architecture that continues to make anamorphic murals so interesting to me.