Breguet Burnishes Brand Heritage Through Frieze Art Fair Partnership Curated By Somi Sim

The Swiss watch company Breguet has been making horological history for almost 250 years.

This month, Breguet made 21st century art history in its partnership with the global Frieze Art Fair. The Breguet Lounge at Frieze New York, which took place May 18 – 22 at The Shed in Hudson Yards, offered a multi-modal installation curated by Korean-born, Paris-based Somi Sim that communicated sensory and poetic notions of time as well as compelling experiences of nocturnal time. As Sim told this writer in the Breguet Lounge at Frieze New York, “Time is one of the great subjects for art, and Breguet has a tradition of innovative complications, artistry, and a leading role in watchmaking history.” In Sim’s point of view, Breguet understands conceptual and artistic time as well as horological time. “For this project,” she said, “It is called Orbital Time, and Breguet gave me total freedom to select artists from around the world who are creating work that explores concepts of time in a dynamic way.”

Having curated various fine art and architecture exhibitions around the world, Sim is also a board member of the Journal of Cultural Theories and recipient of the 2021 Young Artist of the Year Award from Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism. “Our concepts and experiences of time vary from culture to culture, person to person, day to day, as do our ways of keeping time,” Sim noted. Guiding this writer through the Breguet Lounge into a blacked-out room to view the work of Norwegian artist Ann Lisegaard, Sim and this writer watched Lisegaard’s video on a large screen.

Dominated by a four-foot tall computer-enhanced owl that alternately stared silently into our eyes, rotated its head in different directions and randomly expostulated in unintelligible yet compelling language, this virtual encounter with an inscrutable; savage bird of prey reminded us of all the creatures whose internal clocks and instincts are diametrically opposed to those of humans. Telepathically communicating the enigmatic realms of nocturnal time, Lisegaard’s owl reminded us that when the sun goes down, we lose track of time. While we are wired to sleep, owls wake at sunset, and equipped with night vision, they fly, hunt, kill, eat and feed their owl babies…all night long. Upon emerging from this video experience, this writer was surprised to learn she had spent just five minutes with that owl. It felt more like a quarter of an hour had passed.

The main room of the Breguet Lounge at Frieze New York was occupied by the installation, “I Fall In Love Out of Orbit”, by New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective, who are Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Arrayed across a wide wall, this work ticked with large clocks telling the time in New York, Seoul, London, and Los Angeles, cities which also host editions of the Frieze Art Fair. Acknowledging the element of fantasy and myth that enlivens the human conception of time, three clocks designated the hour in the mythical locales of Atlantis, Eldorado, and Kishkindha.

Also animating this exploration of time were clocks that communicated how certain hours of the day are often correlated to specific moods or psychic conditions. For example, on some of the clocks, conditions labeled as “fatigue”, “anxiety”, “ecstasy” or “epiphany” substituted for hour numbers. This aspect of the piece seemed especially astute, as even children love certain times of day, such as when school gets out, because that time often feels ecstatic. For adults, epiphany hour could strike when they leave the office for the day or when their favorite television show airs. Perhaps the most poetic aspect of “I Fall I Love Out of Orbit” involved the clocks that had hands which moved backwards in time. These seemed to suggest how humans are prone to repudiating the present moment by basking in the past. How much time do humans spend reliving memories, fantasizing about the future, day dreaming and night dreaming? It’s got to add up.

While Breguet’s founder Abraham-Louis Breguet (1747-1823) was a conceptual thinker and engineer of time, some of his most important contributions include his revolutionary “perpétuelle” timepiece. Equipped with a kinetic oscillating weight that enabled the calibre to react to the wearer’s movements, the perpétuelle automatically wound the mechanism as the wearer moved. While self-winding Breguets often incorporated a calendar mechanism, they were also the first to embody Breguet’s guilloché silvered dials. This year, Breguet elaborates upon its rich heritage within the Classique collection, which embodies a new perpetual calendar watch. The Quantième Perpétuel 7327, which is pictured above, is available in 18-karat rose gold and 18-karat white gold. While these were on display in the Breguet Lounge, and were even available for purchase, so were tourbillon models from Breguet’s Classique Complications, as well as pieces from the Marine and Tradition collections.

Breguet is especially renowned for having invented the tourbillon (whirlwind), a mechanical device which offsets the effects of gravity on a watch’s performance. This complication ensures accurate timekeeping year on year. For these and other reasons, it makes sense that Breguet would enact a partnership with the Frieze organization. Both are globally recognized brands that are ahead of our time, and both are beloved by people around the world who value creativity, artistry and conceptual breakthroughs.

When it comes to new watch forms and concepts, the Breguet archives abound with them. For instance, they show that in response to a commission from the French Emperor Napoleon’s sister, Caroline Murat, the Queen of Naples, dated June 8th 1810, Breguet conceived and made what is widely believed to be the world’s first luxury wristwatch. Fun fact: it is Breguet watch number 2639. This exceptionally thin repeater watch with complications, dubbed La Reine de Naples (the Queen of Naples) was mounted on a wristlet of braided gold thread and hair.

Breguet’s Reine de Naples wristwatch was delivered to the Queen in 1812. While this timepiece was originally oblong in shape, in 2023, the Reine de Naples wristwatch is a gracefully curved oval and comes in gem set, engraved or lacquered versions. Intriguingly, Caroline Murat was one of many in the Bonaparte family who commissioned Breguet timepieces. While Napoleon’s brother Joseph, the tragically unpopular King of Spain, ordered a pocket watch which he never came to possess, Napoleon consulted his very own Breguet during the 1815 Battle of Waterloo. In the wake of Waterloo, Arthur Wellesley, the British general who triumphed over Napoleon and his army, purchased two Breguet pocket watches from Abraham-Louis Breguet soon after his victorious army’s arrival in Paris. We know this thanks to Waterloo 200 Ltd., the official body recognized by the UK government that commemorated the 200^th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo and continues to impart information about this historical high point.

In a terrific twist of fate, Wellesley purchased for himself the gold pocket watch that Joseph Bonaparte had years earlier commissioned, but by 1815 lacked the resources to purchase. As for the other watch, Wellesley later gave it to his aide-de-camp on the Waterloo battlefield, Major Henry Percy, who had come through uninjured and was the son of an influential earl, Lord Algernon Percy. The victorious general curried favor with the Percys by choosing Henry to carry Wellesley’s official report of the battle back to London and the British Prime Minister, and after that dispatch arrived safely, Wellesley gifted Percy the watch.

Breguet’s centuries of innovation, and the freedom that the company gives Sim to curate the Breguet Lounge project with Frieze, makes this a vital opportunity for her and the artists whose work is seen by thousands of art lovers at each edition of Frieze. As Sim puts it, “Our collective intention is for fairgoers to explore and experience artistic representations of time while engaging with Breguet and its contemporary timepieces.” Just as Breguet continues to advance the technology of timekeeping with its new perpetual calendar watch, the Quantième Perpétuel 7327, Sim and the Breguet Lounge at Frieze Art Fairs are advancing the art historical narrative.