ICONS A Directory of Canonisations around the Turn of the Millennium

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, in its myriad reproduced forms in connection with Maradona’s death, it has morphed from a referential tongue-in-cheek artwork to an object of real religious veneration: an icon. With a photo series by Alessandro Tione.