For One Solid Time, Wet: The Swimming Pool in the Imagination opens at MBAL — the Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle in Switzerland — on October 3, 2026, running through February 21, 2027. Co-curated by Lou Stoppard and Federica Chiocchetti, the exhibition brings together painting, photography, film and sculpture by David Hockney, Bill Viola, Pipilotti Rist, Larry Sultan, Caroline Walker, and Elmgreen & Dragset, among others.

The curators treat the swimming pool as a site where architecture, modernity and bodily experience converge. They read it, too, as a politically charged space where light, bodies and behaviour are carefully regulated. The exhibition notes quote Joan Didion directly: "A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable."

What does the show argue?

The premise runs counter to the postcard. Hockney's brightly coloured Malibu surfaces made viewers long to move west and dive in; Larry Sultan reframed the suburban pool as a surreal, quietly unsettling stage. The MBAL show folds those references into a longer genealogy, presenting the pool as both an emblem of luxury and a vessel of isolation, intimacy and surveillance.

Across paintings, video and sculpture, the familiar rectangle of chlorinated water becomes a lens onto leisure and labour, class and climate. The curators pair canonical works with recent commissions, anchoring the historic in the present tense.

Bill Viola, The Reflecting Pool (1977–79)

Viola's The Reflecting Pool sits at the centre of the biographical argument the curators construct. As a child, Viola nearly drowned during a family vacation. The colours and "almost magical imagery" he saw underwater, and the sense of being held by the water, left a lasting imprint on his work. The piece treats the surface as both barrier and aperture, where a still body of water becomes a screen for slow, episodic appearance and disappearance.

Caroline Walker, Study for Fishing (2017)

Caroline Walker's pool paintings have long interrogated class and access. Study for Fishing belongs to a body of work in which ostensibly luxurious settings — elegant hotels, villas, reclining holidaymakers — give way to more communal scenes: swimming classes, medical pools, crowded public baths. Many of her canvases stage the asymmetry of leisure and labour. Beauticians wait at their stations, ready to paint nails; women stand at sinks washing plates from dinner; bathers recline, suspended between two realities the painter presses into a single frame.

Blaise Drummond, Baltic (2024)

Drummond's Baltic began as a by-product of his painting process. Studying unfinished canvases, the artist lingered on the idea that more might be read there. Intrigued by an image scraped from the internet — a swanky modernist interior with an ocean view beyond — Drummond omitted the architecture and focused on a swimming pool beside the open sea. The painting stages what he reads as an inherited tension: the desire to be immersed in nature set against the impulse to contain it, a sanitised rectangle descended from a pre-Romantic view that untamed water invited fear and repulsion.

Mary Stephenson, New House (2025)

Stephenson frequently refers to her figure-less paintings as "portraits", reflecting how she tries to capture memory, the unconscious and feelings of desire and longing within each work. New House merges the blue of a clear, inviting swimming pool with the suggestion of a womb-like space that contains, holds and protects. To mark the exhibition, Stoppard, Chiocchetti and Stephenson have produced Wet Proof, a waterproof artist's book designed to be read in water, much like a child's bath book. Its pages unite a suite of Stephenson's paintings with a collaborative work of fiction by Candida Desideri and Lou Stoppard, in which chemically treated pool water addresses natural water in imagined dialogue.

Where does the project point?

Wet Proof formalises a curatorial ambition that extends beyond the gallery walls. Stoppard and Chiocchetti are framing the catalogue itself as an exhibition object, formatted for the very environment it depicts. With the show running through February 2027, MBAL positions itself as a venue willing to stage artists' books as sculpture, blurring the line between reading and bathing, between printed matter and the body of water it pictures.