Swatch presents the Art Journey collection at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel

The Bund in Shanghai is a testament to the city’s centuries-old history as an international hub. To the east of the Huangpu River, neon graphics flicker across futuristic skyscrapers, while its western banks are lined with rustic red brick buildings, each housing its own storied past. It is in one of these buildings, transformed 15 years ago into the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, where Swatch presents its latest Art Journey collection with the Guggenheim Museum, bringing a piece of New York to Shanghai.

As Carlo Giordanetti, CEO of Swatch Art Peace Hotel and member of Swatch’s Product and Design Committee, explains when we chatted in the hotel’s Swatch boutique, the Art Journey collections took shape from the brand’s mission to take art off the walls of museums and private collections and inject it into everyday life. Swatch’s first foray into the field of art began in the 80s, when he offered his watches as blank canvases for artists. “Often, “The artists pushed us to develop things we had never imagined,” he shares.

Some four decades later, the brand moved the scope of the collections to museums. The museum’s collections, launched in 2018, spanned collaborators such as MoMA and the Louvre, institutions with strong global recognition that extended far beyond the circle of art enthusiasts. “Our The mission is to work with artists and the arts, while still being extremely broad to reach the spectrum of people we talk to,” says Giordanetti. “In at the same time, [the museums] I have to like the spirit of Swatch, the idea of ​​taking a masterpiece and reinterpreting it. “Not all museums are prepared to do that.”

For its latest collection, Swatch once again turned to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, renewing a long-standing partnership that began in 1992 with its support of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. The new partnership is based on four iconic paintings located in the museum’s New York and Venice branches, resulting in dual-length seconds hand watches that make a playful nod to the museum’s transatlantic dualism.

Claude Monet’s Doge’s Palace, seen from San Giorgio Maggiore (1908) and The Alchemy of Jackson Pollock (1947) both reside in a 41mm case. The sunset hues of Monet’s art glow vibrant orange under ultraviolet light; although it is Pollock, Giordanetti confides, that turned out to be the most difficult piece to adapt due to its enormous intensity. Then there are Edgar Degas’s Dancers in Green and Yellow. (1903) and The Bavarian Don Giovanni by Paul Klee (1919), each of them is housed in a smaller 34mm case. For the tribute to Klee, Swatch equipped the watch with a multicolored rotating disc below the dial, which is revealed through a triangular window at 12 o’clock. The record rotates and displays a new scene with each passing second of the day, in homage to the artist’s infatuation with the five sopranos named in his original painting.

“There is no written rule,” says Giordanetti of Swatch’s latest inspiration options. “Is It is not a magic formula, it is not mathematics. One part is aesthetics and the other is meaning. But there is also this immaterial element, which is if [the artwork] resonates with [the public].” This resonance, which he calls “vibration”, It often determines the success of a collaboration, which in turn continues to fuel the creativity of Swatch designers. Here, those vibrations manifest themselves in the details. Whether it’s Monet’s hidden brilliance or Klee’s mechanical trick, Swatch’s interpretations of each piece go beyond what’s painted on the canvas, reflecting the essence and stories they contain.

The Swiss watch brand’s role as a creator, patron and defender of the arts takes shape not only through its Art Journey collections, but also through the building itself in which it presents the Guggenheim Collection. This year, the Swatch Art Peace Hotel begins its 15th anniversary with a year-long celebration. In 2011, the brand transformed the century-old heritage building into an artist residency, comprising apartments and workshops where more than 20 artists from around the world can live, create and collaborate for months at a time. Initially aimed at visual artists, the Swatch Art Peace Hotel now welcomes musicians, writers and actors, fostering a multidisciplinary community based on creativity and diversity.

To commemorate both the hotel’s anniversary and Swatch’s latest Art Journey collection, the resident artists welcome us upstairs in their exhibition space. Here, they display a collection of pieces, organized thematically with replicas of the four Guggenheim works of art that appear on the watches. A representation of light reflecting off the river on the Bund is displayed in front of Monet’s study of the waterways of Venice. The symbols of femininity, deconstructed and taken to the limit, are presented before Klee’s abstractions of his romantic searches. Like Swatch, the artists in residence here have successfully injected new points of view into the discourse surrounding the four legendary works of art, decades after their conception. And like the latest Swatch models, they have demonstrated how time meets art and then transforms it.

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