The story of a series of over seventy paintings that thematically play on the pitch that in recent decades the Church has increasingly had to cede to football.
Since the late 1990s David Diehl's work has explored the sociopolitical implications of pop-culture phenomena and their specific para-religious function. Icons tells the story of a series of over seventy paintings (2013-2020) that thematically play on the pitch that in recent decades the Church has increasingly had to cede to football. Sócrates, Zidane, Andrés Escobar… Each haloed portrait tells a story of its own, but the fate of Diehl's over-the-top iconographic rendering of—who else!—Diego Maradona takes the cake. After its release from the Zurich studio in which it was created, the image has now come home to Naples, where it has morphed from an allusive tongue-in-cheek artwork about Maradona's death to an object of real religious veneration: an icon.
With a photo series by Alessandro Tione.
David Diehl (born 1976 in Aarau, Switzerland) is a Zurich-based multimedia artist and illustrator who produces (often extensive) conceptual series that may be open-ended in terms of theme or subject matter, or, in the case of projects commissioned by publisher or editors, narrowly circumscribed. Much of his pre-2020 work is about football and religion, plants and mountains, and the magic of the trivial.
