Swatch and Tate have watches down to a fine art

A partnership between Swatch and Tate Galleries is a natural one for the watchmaker, which has long celebrated its artistic links, working with artists including Keith Haring, Yoko Ono (whose show, ‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’ is at Tate Modern until September 2024) and Annie Leibovitz over the last four decades. 

Now, the Swatch x Tate Collection pays tribute to artists JMW Turner, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, and Louise Bourgeois with a series of watches faithfully produced in the artists’ distinctive styles.

Swatch x Tate watches: a masterpiece on your wrist

 JMW Turner’s delicate brushwork becomes an abstract dial in ‘Turner’s Scarlet Sunset’, with the calendar wheel, doubling up as the sun, serving up a prism of colour over a 14-day period. In ‘Chagall’s Blue Circus’, the artist’s bold use of colour becomes a surreal circus. ‘Miro’s Women and Bird in the Moonlight’ also inhabits a magical other world, playfully intertwining Catalan references throughout a subdued dial.

In ‘Léger’s Two Women Holding Flowers’, the artist’s experiments in Cubism are translated into a clean emphasis on colour and line. Colour, too, is central to ‘Matisse’s Snail’, which sees a geometrical juxtaposition of bright forms nod to Matisse’s signature bold Fauvism style. 

Open to interpretation is the abstract design on ‘Barns-Graham’s Orange and Red on Pink’, its muted palette a romantic foil for the black indexes. In ‘Bourgeois’s Spirals’ and ‘Bourgeois’s Spirals Pay!’, the French-American artist’s joyful patterns make for a seductive watch. 

The Swatch x Tate Collection is available from £86 to £106, in Swatch stores worldwide and on swatch.com, as well as in Tate’s gallery shops and on shop.tate.org.uk