With the summer season fully upon us, and the Berlin heat showing no signs of letting up any time soon, we’ve got swimming pools well and truly on the brain. Of course, not all pools are made equal. You’ve got your local lido, replete with screaming children and unidentified floating objects; you’ve got the serious swimmer’s swimming pool, with lane divides and designated speeds, and then you’ve got the luxury Schwimmbad — the kind painstakingly designed by architects to perfectly punctuate its surroundings or, better still, dreamed up by a famous artists, enlisted to elevate an everyday activity to a (literally) immersive experience. Georges Braque, Keith Haring and Laurence Weiner are just some of the greats to have transformed the bathing experience with their talents. Take a look at the fruits of their labour below in our roundup of the ten best swimming pools masterminded by renowned artists.
David Hockney, Swimming Pool at The Roosevelt Hotel
It’s no secret that David Hockney is a fan of the swimming pool. His work abounds with pool imagery, regularly transporting viewers to the water’s tile-lined edge à la his emblematic work, A Bigger Splash. For any devoted fans of the British pop artist, the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles provides the next-level Hockney experience. Beneath its pool’s bright blue waves lies a mural of curved blue lines, painted by the artist in 1988. Despite attempts by local officials to have the work covered up (in line with California’s ban on painted pools), Hockney’s handiwork remains fully in tact to this day, marking the Roosevelt as an art lover’s haven.
James Turrell, Baker Pool
James Turrell’s masterful experiments with luminosity make him one of the most Instagrammable artists out there; his signature works, consisting of entire rooms lit up in LED, drown visitors in light of every colour imaginable, making for an ideal photo opp. Experiencing his work IRL is a drastic contrast to seeing it flattened for a phone screen — as exemplified by his brief but brilliant foray into pool design for the Baker family estate in Connecticut. The private commission saw Turrell create one of his glorious light rooms, but with a crucial difference: about two metres of water. Sadly, the work is not accessible to the public — unless you’re happy to risk a “breaking and entering” misdemeanour.
Keith Haring, Carmine Street Mural
On a blisteringly hot summer’s day in 1987, famed artist-cum-activist Keith Haring held an all-day pool party at the Carmine Street Pool in Greenwich Village, NYC. Whilst Haring painted a cacophony of forms in a blue and yellow mural, legendary DJ Junior Vasquez brought decks and speakers to provide a soundtrack to the pool’s visitors. Now known as the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center, the pool still proudly displays Haring’s mural, allowing local New Yorkers to enjoy a slice of pop art history.
Georges Braque, Les Poissons, Fondation Maeght
Housed in Fondation Maeght, a private foundation nestled on the French Riviera, is Poissons, a hidden gem by Cubist Georges Braque. The shallow pool features a mosaic crafted from traditional tiles, embellished with large, abstract fish and the artist’s signature. Here, the site-specific pool realises the foundation’s vision of integrating art and architecture, as helmed by Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert.
Lawrence Weiner, Stretched As Tightly As Is Possible/ (Satin) & (Petroleum Jelly)
Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner has a way with words; his experiments with typography and language are displayed on books, buildings and, as of 2016, swimming pools. To coincide with the opening of an exhibition of Weiner’s work, collector Rosette Delug invited the artist to install a text work at the bottom of her pool. While the show is long over, the work still resides at the bottom of Delug’s pool – converting her morning swim into a private view of its own.
Elmgreen & Dragset, Van Gogh’s Ear
New York City has more than 60 public pools, but back in 2016 (a good year for pool art) one of them had a couple of crucial differences. Gargantuan installation Van Gogh’s Ear, by Berlin-based Scandinavian art duo Elmgreen & Dragset, was crafted to mimic a garden pool flipped to an incongruous vertical angle above ground. The upright, cyan blue sculpture towered beside Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center, delighting and bewildering tourists in equal measure. Sadly,Van Gogh’s Ear has since finished its run— and we don’t think that Fifth Avenue looks half as good.
Ed Ruscha, Studio City
Want a custom artist-designed pool of your own? We recommend you tap your creative family members for the purpose, just as Ed Ruscha’s brother did for his private pool in Studio City. The pop artist pulled out all the stops for his sibling, producing a large-scale text work in glistening white tiles. Resembling a registration form, with blank spaces to fill in, the piece is designed to grab swimmers’ attention with its large type-face and provoke questions about ownership and identity. A quick existential dive anyone?
Alfredo Barsuglia, Social Pool
Unlike a lot of the pools on this list, Social Pool, by Viennese artist Alfredo Barsuglia, was from its inception completely open to the public — if they could find it. Erected in 2014 in the south Californian desert, the humble eleven-by-five-feet structure echoed the sparse desert in its stark minimalism. While its location was initially a secret, the pool became a miniature tourist attraction when Wikipedia published its coordinates. After considerable wear-and-tear, the pool was demolished but the debris remains, serving as a site of pilgrimage for the art lovers campaigning for its reopening.
Jorge Macchi, Piscina
Inspired by the pages of an address book, Jorge Macchi’s permanent installation has resided at modern art museum Inhotim, set in the Brazilian jungle, since 2009. Fully functional and open to the public, visitors to the vast outdoor gallery and botanical garden can cool off with a swim in Piscina‘s azure waters, gliding back and forth from A to Z.
Pablo Picasso, Pool at Villa El Martinete
Worried that your eight bedroom, palatial villa in the south of Spain doesn’t quite cut the mustard? You may well be right. Villa El Martinete, located in Marbella, sets a standard for true luxury with its covetable swimming pool hand-painted by Picasso. This level of ostentation doesn’t come cheap, with the villa and its figure-adorned pool previously listed at 15 million euros.