Remember me
When you think of Swatch watches, invariably your mind jumps to ‘Fun!’, ‘Vibrant!’ ‘Affordable!’ and ‘Quartz is cool!’ It does make the watchmaker's position in the notoriously gated art world even more amazing all things considered. As well as tapping names like Kiki Picasso, Annie Leibovitz and Keith Haring, it has plundered the archives of some of the world’s most famous museums (s'up the Uffizi and Louvre Abu Dhabi) to turn pieces from their collections into wearable works of art. For 2026 it’s the turn of Guggenheim and Peggy Guggenheim Collection to get the Swatch treatment with four bangers.
Jackson Pollock's Alchemy
Claude Monet's Palazzo Ducale
The Guggenheim collaboration is a transatlantic first, for which Swatch has taken four works of art from both collections and splashed them all over its dials and straps. Literally in the case of the Pollock, which is covered in a detail from his 1974 Alchemy (£96). The smudgy feet of Degas’s dancers from his 1903 Dancers in Green and Yellow (£86) also finds its new canvas on Swatch’s instantly recognisable Gent silhouette. The other two featuring the names of five woman from Paul Klee’s 1919 Bavarian Don Giovanni (£86) – two opera singers he admired, and rather brazenly, three women he’d slept with – and the woozy sun-kissed image of Monet’s 1908 The Palazzo Ducale, Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore (from £96) contain a couple of surprises. The Klee has an open aperture at 12 o’clock behind which is a disc that changes the colour inside it daily, while the Monet’s dial glows a vibrant orange after being exposed to UV light, and it is also equipped with SwatchPAY, the brand’s contactless payment system.
“Swatch definitely began collaborating with famous artists to gain a foot hold in the art community,” says acclaimed American artist Esther Glina Montagner, who is perhaps more renowned in watch circles for having auctioned off a watch collection of 600 Swatches, many of them rarities through LAMA in 2023. “It put its money on the line to create ‘wearable art’, as they called it. It was also a way for Swatch to upgrade its cheap plastic watches into a more cultural, trendy, art, fashion mass market product.”
It’s an incredible trajectory for a brand that started out as a fun piece of plastic. However, it does make sense. “The initial idea of the brand relied on three essential pillars – that it was fun, affordable and Swiss-made,” says Jean Vanheurck de Tornaco, the founder and owner of Swatch Vintage Collection. “The idea itself was very bold, and completely deconstructed what watchmaking was about at that time. The market was used to higher end products from the Swiss then here came the Swatch, in a disturbing simplicity, bringing a new meaning to watches and fashion.”
Paul Klee's Bavarian Don Giovanni
“We have to imagine that there is a Swatch way to look at it, because we don’t want to do a postcard, souvenir type of work. It's all about positive provocation,” says Swatch creative director Carlo Giordanetti when asked how he and his team decide which painting and what treatment it will receive. “We need to be able to reinterpret the work, to bring a bit of Swatch into it.”
Bringing a bit of Swatch into your outfit is also the ideal antidote to everyday wrist-flex boredom. Keeping it simple is fine but if you’re tired of the usual monochrome yet don’t want to start going technicolour with your outfits, sporting one of these is an easy way to inject a bit of jazz, not to mention start a watch conversation that doesn’t involve the words “authorised dealer”, “pre-owned” or “Rolex”. Just make sure you swot up on some facts before you take your new acquisition out on the town. You don’t want to get art shamed now, do you?