Four artists create new workNew Watches: Swatch & Art Collection
Swatch has expanded its popular Swatch & Art Collection with new watches by four contemporary artists and designers working in a broad range of mediums and styles. Indian fashion designer Manish Arora contributes a wonderfully colourful Bollywood-inspired ‘movie’ watch, while French artist, writer and film director Enki Bilal presents two Gents in the signature style of his many graphic novels and comic books. The ever-playful English fashion designer, Cassette Playa (née Carri Munden) has designed a funny and fashionable one-eyed Gent that glows in the dark. Chilean sculptor and visual artist Iván Navarro has created an arresting image of a skull and crossbones on a mirror.
These five new Swatch Art Specials enhance and continue the celebrated relationship between Swatch and Art, which began in Paris with launch of the first Art Special at the Pompidou Centre in 1985. That first encounter sparked a delightful series of joint productions with artists from around the world, work that continues to flow from the minds and hands of contemporary artists today. The creations by Manish Arora, Enki Bilal, Carri Munden and Iván Navarro are the latest evidence of this remarkably productive liaison between the Swiss fashion watch and jewellery firm and the world of contemporary art, fashion and design.
Among the many notable contributors to the Swatch & Art Collection are the Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar, the French street painter and rapper Grems, the noted painter, sculptor and writer Ted Scapa, and New York City’s ‘urban primitivist’ painter, Billy The Artist.