Audemars Piguet is one of the big beasts of the haute horology world and also one of the most historic. But that doesn’t preclude the independent Swiss watchmaker from avant garde collaborations. Its dedicated arts programme, Audemars Piguet Contemporary, commissions international visual artists, while fostering partnerships with cultural institutions to present the artwork to global audiences. But it wasn’t until recently that the brand partnered with a renowned contemporary artist in the making of a timepiece.
This was a challenge relished by the artist Kaws, aka Brian Donnelly. Kaws’s subversive cartoon characters started life as toys, have grown into big sculptures, have been blown up into gigantic inflatables and also incorporated into paintings that reach eight-figure sales at auction. Now the pop artist has worked at miniature scale on the new watch, displaying his dystopian figure Companion inside the titanium case.
Kaws, aka Brian Donnelly
Both Kaws and the watchmaking team wanted to have a 3-D Companion as the focus of the design
Donnelly was known for his street graffiti in New Jersey and Manhattan, marking with his tag, Kaws, chosen because he liked the way the letters looked together. Soon he developed a style of “subvertising”, disrupting street furniture with cartoon figures. “In the early Nineties I started painting over billboards with graffiti,” he says. “That got me thinking about advertising and the way it exists in the landscape — the competitiveness between what you want to communicate with graffiti and what advertisers want to communicate. So I started painting over the models in the ads in phone booths and bus shelters.”
After studying illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Donnelly worked as a background painter on animations such as Disney’s 101 Dalmations. “Later, through a friend in Japan, I had the opportunity to make small toy objects. I started to think about the history of animation and what resonates. That’s where Companion started,” he explains. The character, with its skull and crossbones head and crosses for eyes, is now 25 years old.
Working with cult streetwear labels, and with a huge social media following, Kaws bridges the lowbrow with high art, traversing the art universe from street to museum to auction house. His work sells for anything between £20 in Uniqlo to more than £11 million at auction in Hong Kong in 2019. That same year he partnered with the Dior menswear director, Kim Jones, for his spring/summer catwalk to interpret the house’s bee motif, with a backdrop of a 33ft pink flower sculpture of one of his characters. His solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in 2022, which was recreated as an explorable map for the online game Fortnite, resulted in it becoming the most visited exhibition of all time.
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The watch invites a one-on-one dialogue with Companion
In the early days of the watch partnership with Audemars Piguet, telling the time proved to be a stumbling block for the envisioned watch. Both Kaws and the watchmaking team wanted to have a 3-D Companion as the focus of the design, but where would the watch hands go so they didn’t obstruct the mascot? The watchmakers came up with a track around the edge of the dial that indicates the hours and minutes. This, says the CEO, Ilaria Resta, is the reward of working in collaboration. “They [collaborators] help us push the boundaries of what we can do,” she says. “We solved the problem with the peripheral hands display, which involved engineering a new movement — one which gives a beating heart to Companion with a tourbillon.”
The 43mm Royal Oak Concept Tourbillon Companion in titanium not only pushes time to the sides but sees the character’s detailed face and hands seemingly attached to the underside of the sapphire glass, peering out at the world, to allow, as Donnelly puts it, “a one-on-one dialogue with Companion. He’s just there looking back at you.”
An 11m Companion sits on the roof of the original Audemars Piguet building in Le Brassus
Kaws’s work has been compared to Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons
The artist’s work has been compared with that of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, as well as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, who all grasped the possibilities of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. “I have this project called Holiday where we show a giant sculpture all over the world, tied to iconic locations like Mount Fuji, or floating in Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong,” he says. “It’s about the idea of having an object in the landscape. So we brought it to Audemars Piguet. I thought that added a nice layer to the project. I love scale.”
On a stormy night in the Vallée de Joux, Donnelly is looking across to the original Audemars Piguet building in Le Brassus, now home to the brand’s Museum and Atelier, where an 11m Companion sits on the roof. “I turned 50 a few weeks ago and I do think about time, particularly now I have kids. As an artist you try and find new ways to make work.” And now that art is taken off walls and floors — and the roof — and can be worn on the wrist.
POA, audemarspiguet.com
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