Modern mural art on mural.ch

The mural.ch portal is a publicly accessible data collection.

22 years ago, Alex Winiger founded the online documentation mural.ch. The initial aim was to create supporting documentation for his own mural commissions, allowing approaches and artistic solutions to be evaluated or substantiated by comparison with existing works. From the outset, this documentation was intended not as a private card index, but as a publicly accessible data collection. It grew rapidly and developed into an independent project.

Today, mural.ch contains information on 1949 groups of works and 15886 individual works created from the late 19th century to the present, with a particular focus on muralism proper from the 1920s to the 1950s. While the first records were based primarily on site visits, Alex Winiger now systematically reviews literature and catalogues on subjects such as American New Deal art and public art in Switzerland during the interwar period. This inventory information can often be expanded through inspections, conversations with experts and artists, and targeted source research.

A recurring difficulty is locating the works—which are inherently site-specific—so that they can actually be found. Some sources do not provide an exact location. Today, mural.ch allows a marker on a map to be used alongside or instead of an address for precise location. Geographic coordinates are assigned to the marker or address. (Even authors of books on public artworks have now begun to cite geodata.) When a work is documented with photographs containing geodata, these are included in the record.

Since 2017, Alex Winiger has written thematic articles on mural art. Initially, these were short summaries of aspects such as the decontextualisation of works, or excerpts from publications such as David Kunzle’s presentation of the Nicaraguan School of Public and Monumental Art (1995). Later, tours and walking guides were added, including the tour of the «borghi dipinti» of the Montagna Varesina., as well as articles in specialist journals since 2020.

mural.ch welcomes contributions from other authors. You can document works, publish articles, and provide references to relevant literature. A guide on mural.ch explains how. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.