Pierre Biver, the creative director of the luxury watch brand Biver, was on a video call with a reporter early last month when he turned his laptop toward one wall of his apartment in Geneva to show off an untitled abstract painting by the Swiss contemporary artist Guillaume Ehinger.
At 180 centimeters by 240 centimeters (almost 6 feet by 8 feet), the acrylic on canvas, which depicts a series of Rorschach-like blots amid a graduated range of blue and orange hues, dwarfed the space. Mr. Biver acknowledged that asking Mr. Ehinger, whose specialty is large-format paintings, to create a work of art for the dial of a wristwatch posed some challenges.
“When you’re working on a big scale, it’s not only about the painting, it’s about the light in the room,” Mr. Biver said. “It’s about the way it occupies space. How are you going to transfer that and bring the same emotions on a watch? And I thought to myself, ‘Well, that’s not my problem. It’s Guillaume’s responsibility.’”
Now, a one-of-a-kind 39-millimeter Automatique watch by Biver in steel — with a dial enameled and engraved under Mr. Ehinger’s direction — is among the 25 timepieces scheduled for auction Dec. 7 during the second edition of TimeForArt.
The biennial event, held at Phillips’s Park Avenue gallery and organized in association with Bacs & Russo, is a fund-raiser for the Swiss Institute, a nonprofit art institution in New York City.
The inaugural edition, held in December 2022, sold 17 timepieces, raising $1.2 million to support the institute’s free public exhibitions, programs and educational workshops. “The watch brands were incredibly supportive of Swiss Institute,” Stefanie Hessler, the institute’s director, said last month on a video call from its headquarters in the East Village. “I think they really love that it’s a collaborative project where we bring together the worlds of watchmaking and art making and also highlight the artistry within the watch world.”
As Ms. Hessler and Mojdeh Cutter, the institute’s director of partnerships and TimeForArt, prepared for the second edition, they stressed that the participating brands — a mix of independent and group-owned labels, including Bulgari, Breitling, Massena LAB and Zenith — approached the event’s theme, “Artists for Artists,” from different angles.
“The theme is not meant to be prescriptive, as in ‘If you’re going to participate, it has to be with an external artist,’” said Ms. Cutter, who joined the video call. “It is really an invitation for each brand to think about what creativity within their own maison means.
“It gives some brands an opportunity to step outside of their production expectations for the year and gives them this experimental space where they can highlight something that they haven’t had a chance to highlight.”
Ms. Cutter referred to Chopard’s contribution as an example: an Alpine Eagle model whose dial was created by an engraver in its workshop in the Swiss village of Fleurier using an esoteric decorative technique known as straw marquetry. (Chopard would not disclose the engraver’s full name, a common practice in many European ateliers.)
“She’s using straw material in different colors and she made an abstract arrangement,” Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, the brand’s co-president, said on a recent call from Geneva. “It can be interpreted in different ways: the skyline of New York or the view an eagle sees as it’s flying over New York or actually the feather of an eagle. Or you can find your own interpretation.”
Other timepieces in the auction, including Biver’s collaboration with Mr. Ehinger, display the creations of fine artists. Maurice Lacroix, for example, teamed with the Mexican artist Rodrigo Hernández on a watch featuring a handcrafted bronze dial and skeletonized movement. Louis Erard created a logo-less, monochromatic blue watch with the Swiss avant-garde artist Olivier Mosset. Ressence partnered with the British contemporary artist Shantell Martin for a one-off edition of its Type 1² watch. Zenith collaborated again with the Argentine-Spanish visual artist Felipe Pantone, whom it had worked with before.
And Armin Strom created a special version of its Mirrored Force Resonance model distinguished by a hardstone dial of lapis lazuli, a tribute to the Swiss painter Franz Gertsch. The “Blue Phase” work of the artist, who died in 2022, was characterized by use of ultramarine, a rich pigment derived from lapis.
Ms. Hessler said she was heartened by the exuberance she saw among the brands participating in the TimeForArt sale. “They have this appreciation of art and they see the proximity to it, even though the worlds are different,” she said.
For the artist and watch collector Phillip Toledano, a co-founder of the boutique brand Toledano & Chan, the decision to create a prototype version of its Brutalist-inspired B/1 watch featuring a dial and asymmetric case fashioned from meteorite seemed natural.
“It’s an opportunity to say, ‘This is who we are,’” Mr. Toledano said by phone recently. “Toledano & Chan is about form and it’s about materials.”
He contrasted the design-forward piece with the tool watches — a term for durable, easy-to-read timepieces designed for outdoor activities — that have dominated watch sales in recent years. “We’re kind of crawling through what I call ‘the cosplay era,’” Mr. Toledano said. “We spent the last 10 to 15 years pretending to be divers, explorers, commandos. It was like dress-up — ‘Sure, you’re a finance bro, but look, you’ve got this dive watch, maybe you’ve got a rugged side to you.’”
“I would hope that we are entering an era that is more interesting,” he said. “I think this industry seems to be moving that way anyway, but slowly of course — it’s like moving the Titanic.”
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