Swatch Launches Art Journey Collection with Seven New Limited-Edition Timepieces

CONTENT: Luxe Society Asia

The Swatch love affair with art started in 1985 with a long line of Art Special watches. Always looking for new ways to democratise the art world, Swatch joined forces with the world-famous museums to recreate some of their most powerful artworks as part of a new Museum Journey series from Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (2018), Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid (2018) followed by the Musée du Louvre in Paris (2019), MoMA in New York (2021), and Centre Pompidou in Paris (2022).

This 2023, the art journey continues with seven new designs in collaboration with MoMa, Magritte, Le Gallerie Degli Uffizi, and Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Swatch teams up with Moma in honouring the 100th anniversary of American pop-artist Roy Lichtenstein in two special timepieces. The watches blend his unique, comic-style art and single-colour Benday dots with the playfulness and creativity of Swatch.

To mark the 125th birth anniversary of Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte’s, two watches take his most famous paintings and translate them into wearable art for the wrist. The collaboration includes two of the artists’ most influential works, ‘Le Fils de L’Homme’, a 1964 painting ‘The Son of Man’, which depicts the face of its bowler-hatted subject obscured by a hovering green apple. “Ceci est un Swatch avec une pomme” is written on the strap – a playful reference to the artist’s famous quotation “Ceci nest pas une pipe” and ‘La Trahison des Images’.

Next is the two masterpiece renaissance collection of ‘Allegoria della Primavera’ and ‘Nascita Di Venere’ by Sandro Botticelli of the renowned Le Gallerie degli Uffizi. ‘Allegoria della Primavera’ (Allegory of Spring) painting has at least 138 different species of plants, In the wearable version, the strap features Flora, goddess of flowers, adorned with cornflowers, wild strawberries, violets, and myrtle, among the citrus trees.

The second design from this masterpiece is “Nascita Di Venere’ (The Birth of Venus), on the dial are the gods of winds, Zephyr and breeze, Aura who gently drives Venus towards the shore, her unmistakably beautiful face and pink roses covers the strap.

Lastly, the final piece in this art journey collection is the collaboration between the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The design features the ‘Great Wave Off Kanagawa’ by Katsushika Hokusai and renowned sophisticated Astrolabe artefact by Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Battûtî.

The powerful and iconic Japanese artwork by Katsushika Hokusai, part of the iconic Japanese series ‘Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji’ is transformed into this unique timepiece.

The challenging willingness of men to explore the oceans and infinity, to be face to face with the power of nature, water and the night sky envelop this Swatch in Prussian blue tones reflects in this timepiece Hokusai’s artwork.

On the dial and front side of the watch strap is a close-up image of the cresting wave that cleverly plays with perspective to make Japan’s grandest mountain appear as a small triangular mound within its hollow. The underside depicts elements from Astrolabe, a marvel of mankind that is the flat projection of a night sky used to help calculate the position of the stars and determine the exact time of day.

The Swatch x MOMA and Swatch x Magritte watches is now available in Swatch stores and online, the collaborations with Le Gallerie degli Uffizi and Louvre Abu Dhabi will be available from 13 April 2023.