As global Associate Partner of Art Basel since 2013, Audemars Piguet has been presenting innovative lounge concepts in the Collectors Lounge in Hong Kong, Basel, and Miami Beach. The displayed artworks and the spaces in which they are presented are part of a series of collaborations with artists and designers that give expression to the Manufacture’s cultural and geographic origins.
The new 2019 lounge concept designed by Brooklyn-based artist and designer Fernando Mastrangelo invites viewers to experience the Vallée de Joux through seamless gradients of tones and textures. Mastrangelo’s immersive design features a strata wall, display cases and furniture made of granular materials including sand, rock salt, silica, limestone and crushed boulders from the Vallée de Joux. Deconstructing and reconstructing nature and time, Mastrangelo’s design evokes Audemars Piguet’s rooted history in the Vallée de Joux, as well as the intricate process of Haute Horlogerie, from its natural resources to the final assembly of the watch’s movement and case.
An “escape” lounge in the middle of the booth invites visitors to relax and experience a disconnected moment in the Swiss Jura Mountains at sunset, and discover, in a forest of sand and silica moulded spruce trees, the 13 references of Code 11.59 by Audemars Piguet as well as a selection of historical watches with unconventional forms and designs. The architecture of this semi-closed space is imbued by the round and octagonal geometric case of the Manufacture’s latest watch collection.
Fernando Mastrangelo's lounge design will travel to all Art Basel editions throughout 2019 and continue its evolution in 2020.
