LE LOCLE.- This exhibition explores the swimming pool as a significant motif within the history of contemporary art. It unites artists who have explored the complexity of the pool, using it as a symbol of both prosperity and catastrophe, joy and solitude: a metaphor for our search for order and serenity in the face of an increasingly uncertain future.
At once an architectural and sculptural object, a geometric space, and a stage for bodily experiences, the pool embodies the control of nature, and a form of collective dreaming tied to modernity, well-being and intimacy. It emerges as an ambivalent site, capable of evoking serenity as much as solitude, fulfilment as much as emptiness, luxury as much as ruin.
Within the exhibition, the swimming pool is considered as a political instrument or environment, bearing similarities to the museum or the art gallery: a space in which light, bodies and lines are controlled, where order prevails over disorder, and where certain boundaries govern behaviours, interactions and norms. Writing in The White Album, about California and water use, Joan Didion argues that “a pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable.”
The exhibition engages with Didion’s notion of a quest for order, offering a critical and poetic reading of the swimming pool as an icon of Western societies, while highlighting the alternative narratives it can carry—queer, political, or connected to memory and the passage of time. The artists featured in the exhibition present the pool as more than a simple leisure setting: instead, it is a space for aesthetic and social reflection, a mirror of contemporary longings and anxieties.
Le Locle is a region shaped by water, or its disappearance. The name of the town comes from the Latin word for lake, and historically, there was a small lake near Le Locle: early maps and records from the 16th–17th centuries show a body of water or marshy area near the town, but urban expansion and drainage for watchmaking and housing eliminated it by the 18th–19th century. Today, Le Locle’s large public outdoor pools try to compensate this loss. This context – and the wider issue of global water crisis - has been central to the development of the exhibition. So too has a playful yet troubling rumour in the recent history of the MBAL: a proposal, by some politicians, to close the museum and replace it with an indoor swimming pool. Luckily, for the artistic and cultural heritage of Le Locle, the Canton of Neuchtel, and Switzerland more broadly, this project has not come to fruition, and, with this show, the threat – and the ideas connected to it, regarding power, aspiration and modernity - is transformed into an exhibition theme.
Through a selection of paintings, films, photography, sculptures and more, by national and international artists, the exhibition immerses visitors in the visual, symbolic, and emotional universe of the swimming pool. Works on show will include Restoration of an Empty Pool (2007) by Rossella Biscotti, in collaboration with Kevin van Braak, a film that reveals the slow and laborious process of cleaning the swimming pool at the Foro Mussolini in Rome; a series of images from Larry Sultan’s Swimmers, taken in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a body of work that seems to directly evoke a sense of chaos and confusion beneath a surface of stillness; Alain Jacquet’s Le Djeuner sur l’herbe (1970), which revisits Manet’s famous modern and intimate painting by replacing the natural body of water with a man-made swimming pool; as well as One Swimming Pool by Elisabeth Tonnard (2013), a book that can be arranged to form a temporary pool.
A specially commissioned performance by the Swiss artist Marie-Caroline Hominal will unfold at the public swimming pool of Le Locle on 23 October, 2026, extending and activating her presence within the museum’s exhibition. The participating artists include Judith Albert, Nazgol Ansarinia, Rossella Biscotti in collaboration with Kevin van Braak, Andrew Cranston, Blaise Drummond, Elmgreen & Dragset, Ellie Epp, Kate Gottgens, Alexander Hahn, David Hockney, Marie-Caroline Hominal, Alain Jacquet, Hilary Lloyd, Jean-Luc Manz, Daina Mattis, Alexandra Maurer, Ian Mwesiga, Antonio Ob, Michael Raedecker, Pipilotti Rist, Anastasia Samoylova, Denis Savary, Leanne Shapton, Mary Stephenson, Larry Sultan, Elisabeth Tonnard, Levi van Veluw, Eva Vermandel, Bill Viola, and Caroline Walker. A section of the exhibition is also dedicated to artists’ books, featuring works by Diego Abelln & Joaqun Lucas, Roni Horn, Tanja Lažetić and Ed Ruscha.
A special waterproof artist’s book that can be handled and read in water — similar to children’s bath books — will be both an exhibited artwork and a keepsake of the exhibition. This unique take on an exhibition catalogue will showcase works by the London-based painter Mary Stephenson, whose subtly nuanced palette moves between intensity and pastel tones.
The pool is a repeating motif in the work of Stephenson, and in various of her paintings hypnagogic environments and architectonic worlds intersect with abstract forms, evoking archetypes — physical spaces or objects — that summon the unconscious, emotions, and the elusive nature of memory. Her images will be accompanied by a new work of fiction written collaboratively by Candida Desideri and Lou Stoppard.
