Movado is a watch brand with a 100-year history, but also a laboratory of ideas where minimalist design and artistic languages meet to redefine the very concept of time as an aesthetic experience. It is from this vision that the Artist Series was born, a collection of limited edition watches that, over the course of more than four decades, has translated the works and poetics of international artists into wearable objects.

For these artistic collaborations, the famous Movado Museum Dial with the dot at 12 o’clock remains the constant reference, also as an element of balance between brand identity and artist intervention. The models are generally powered by quartz movements with minimal steel cases that leave the dial as the visual protagonist.

In 1960, the Museum Dial, designed in ’47 by modernist designer Nathan George Horwitt, became the first clock dial to enter the permanent collection of New York’s MOMA.

Movado’s Artist Series : an artistic legacy that spans the decades

La Artist Series began in the late 1980s as an experimental project that transports visual art to the dial, and the first chapter of the series was written in 1988 with Andy Warhol. Five watches, five black-and-white photographs of New York compose a single timepiece: serially repeated urban images that find a new scale and rhythm in the dials, imagined as a tribute to the city and the serial repetition of pop art.

Movado toward the present: the story of an ever-moving watch

At left, artist and curator Derrick Adams. On the right, American photographer Alexi Lubomirski .

From then on, Movado collaborates with internationally prominent artists who reinterpret time according to unique visual codes. Collaborations range from the chromatic kineticism of Yaacov Agam, to the geometric compositions of Max Bill, to the visual expressionism of Romero Britto.

In 2020 it is the turn of American photographer Alexi Lubomirski, who brings an intimate and contemplative vision to the collection. In the first drop, his shots-dedicated to light, water and urban settings-become evocative surfaces, while the second drop also reflects an ethical sensibility in the concrete attention to materials and processes with the introduction of vegan straps and recycled packaging.

The following year, Movado paid tribute to Carmen Herrera, a key figure in modernist abstraction. Her essential compositions, built on sharp lines and bold color fields, find a natural support in the dial.

Pictured is Carmen Herrera, Cuban artist considered a key figure in Modernist Abstractionism.

“This dazzling series of watches embodies that modernist vision of the integration of great art and design into functional form and everyday life,” says Herrera. The result is a rigorous series of 500 pieces that dialogues perfectly with the brand’s minimalist DNA: five watches in stainless steel and calfskin leather straps, three with round cases and two with square cases.

Two years later, in 2023, visual energy explodes with Kenny Scharf, an artist symbolic of pop surrealism. His dynamic forms and vibrant colors introduce an opposite register to Herrera’s, transforming the watch into a dynamic and vitality-laden object in which references to urban culture and pop imagery are interwoven in an immediate and playful way.

The final chapter, in 2025, is given to Derrick Adams, whose research on African American identity and experience takes shape in a series that plays on fragmented compositions and intense colors, and extends the project to wall clocks as well.

Movado beyond function: time as an artistic surface

Within the Artist Series, the watch becomes a precise and delimited support, on which the work is adapted without losing recognizability. Images, compositions and visual rhythms are recalibrated to coexist with indices, hands and proportions, maintaining a constant balance between legibility and aesthetic identity. It is in this tension that the series builds its coherence.

Over time, Movado has thus created an archive that reflects the evolution of contemporary art as much as that of design applied to watchmaking. Limited editions, often numbered and produced in short runs, place these timepieces in a hybrid zone, somewhere between functional object, design project and collector’s piece. What distinguishes the Artist Series is thus not only the collaboration with high-sounding names in the contemporary art system, but the ability to transform each timepiece into a narrative, in which function and form are intertwined.

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