For One Solid Time: Wet, The Swimming Pool in the Imagination

Alain Jacquet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1964. Diptych, four-color cellulose screen print on paper mounted on canvas, 175 x 195 cm. ©Alain Jacquet / ADAGP, Paris, 2026. Courtesy of Alain Jacquet Estate and Perrotin.

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, on California and water usage, Joan Didion argues “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 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 Neuchâtel, 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.