Jeff Koons is blowing up Hublot
The artist’s Balloon Dog watches have the bow-wow factor
Artist Jeff Koons is rhapsodising about the properties of titanium and polished sapphire crystal in his new limited-edition MP-14 Origin collaboration with Hublot. “A central tourbillon becomes the first pulse and everything else unfolds around it like a controlled expansion. It’s the idea of a Big Bang translated through engineered motion, material tension and the physics of light.”
The Hublot x Jeff Koons collection also includes a series of timepieces inspired by the artist’s five monumental steel Balloon Dog (1994-2000) sculptures, one of which sold for $58.4mn at Christie’s New York in 2013 – a prelude to him breaking the record for the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction with Rabbit ($91.1mn) in 2019.
“It was joyful to be able to realise these watches,” he tells me, with the wide, untroubled smile that seems to be his factory setting. It’s not Koons’ first luxury collaboration. The artist has worked with Louis Vuitton on a series of bags and Stella McCartney on a capsule collection of ready-to-wear and accessories. Hublot feels like a natural match. Koons’ practice is at times more that of an industrial creative director than a sculptor: he builds meticulous models from which specialist workshops create mirror-polished pieces with a finish that erases any trace of the human hand.
The Balloon Dog watches for Hublot have that unmistakably vibrant Koons presence: the balloon dog’s tail in coloured rubber at 10.30; the pumped-up crown and the inflated design
“It’s fantastic,” he says without a trace of false modesty. This is decidedly not a piece of wanton quick-fix gimmickry cobbled together to shift a few hundred watches in a difficult market. “These are limited editions that I’ve created,” he says, with a maker’s satisfaction. “I had choices: whether I wanted to do this, or whether I wanted to spend my time doing something else. And I was very, very happy to be involved in this endeavour.”