David Diehl’s work since the late 1990s explores 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 the church has increasingly had to cede to football in recent decades. 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 beats all: after its release from the Zürich studio in which it was created, the image has now come „home“ to Naples, where it has morphed from an allusive tongue-in-cheek art work about Maradona’s death to an object of real religious veneration, an icon.
With a photo series by Alessandro Tione.