September 19, 2019

THE GENIUS OF THE M.A.D. GALLERY

by AHMED SEDDIQI & SONS

What happens when one of the most inventive mechanical Swiss watch companies turns its attentions to art? MB&F’s M.A.D. art gallery on the Dubai Mall’s Fashion Avenue provides an explosive answer

Fans of independent watchmaking will know MB&F, short for Maximilian Büsser and Friends. The Swiss microbrand produces wildly inventive ‘machines’ that reimagine how a mechanical watch displays time. Its high-concept creations have become highly collectible, even in the short time since it was founded in 2005. Earlier this year, we covered the young brand’s first ladies’ piece, the spectacular Legacy Machine FlyingT launched at Baselworld in March. Like everything else in MB&F’s collection, it’s a status-quo smasher.

In 2011, MB&F opened a gallery in Geneva that paired watchmaking with the parallel universe of mechanical art. Dubbed the ‘M.A.D. Gallery’, it created a showcase for artists whose work brought together the same elevated aesthetics and mechanical experimentation seen in MB&F watches.

In 2016, Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons opened a M.A.D. Gallery on Dubai Mall’s Fashion Avenue, which in the three years since has served as a tableau for some magnificently bewildering pieces. Here, we’ve picked out four currently available to our customers. Come by for a visit – these works have to be seen with the naked eye before they can be fully appreciated.

Medusa, by MB&F + L’Epée 1839

Medusa is the tenth collaboration between MB&F and Swiss high-end clockmakers L’Epée 1839, and shows the time via two rotating rings visible through a glass hood. Of course, that’s not the first thing you notice about this work, which instead is the close resemblance it bears to a jellyfish. That effect is created by the hand-blown Murano glass dome that envelops those two timekeeping rings and the mechanical movement that powers them, beating away like the pulsating organs of an aquatic invertebrate. Underneath those are five tentacle-like extensions that either serve as a desktop stand, or float decoratively when Medusa is mounted into a ceiling. It comes in blue, green or pink, each limited to 50 pieces

Nixie Machine III, by Frank Buchwald

Frank Buchwald is a one-time science-fiction illustrator, who in 1993 added a third dimension to his work when he began designing and manufacturing metallic furniture. One of Frank’s signatures is his ‘machine lights’, industrially inspired lamps that are hand-manufactured in his Berlin studio. This third iteration of the Nixie Machine is also the third produced in collaboration with the M.A.D. Gallery. As well as providing soft, warm light, it’s also a clock, showing the time through six nixie tubes produced by the Czech entrepreneurial engineer Dalibor Farny, who recently revived the traditional manufacturing technique behind them. This series is made up of 18 unique pieces, all exclusively available through the galleries.

MeCre, by Gaby Wormann

While they don’t actually tell the time, the connection between Gaby Wormann’s MeCre (short for Mechanical Creatures) sculptures and MB&F’s highly complex watches is clear. Wormann takes clockwork wheels, gears, plates and even delicate balance springs to create hybrid insects with three-dimensional mechanical exoskeletons. These are exposed through frozen, eerily lifelike shells that combine with the mechanical parts to make objects that look like the subjects of a futuristic, vaguely unsettling entomology project. Behind the aesthetic, Wormann says her work is inspired by the writings of Franz Kafka and the artists H.R. Giger and Pierre Matter, and by the idea of ‘humanity’s intervention in complex biological systems’. Wormann has created nine unique pieces for the gallery, including a birdwing butterfly, an emperor scorpion and some of the world’s largest beetles.

Stingray, by Apical Reform

Founded in 2011, India’s Apical Reform is one of the world’s most exciting young multi-disciplinary design studios. Its extraordinary Stingray has the air of a piece of mechanical art that might one day sit in a museum as evidence of what the finest minds of our time were able to achieve. Inspired by the majestic stingray, it undulates hypnotically in a motion that mimics the underwater flying motion of the endangered sea creature. Described as a piece of ‘abstract kinetic sculpture’, it’s powered by an electronic motor with mechanical parts, and measures an imposing 1.8 metres in length. It’s one of two pieces created exclusively for M.A.D. Gallery by the company and is limited to eight pieces in charcoal grey and rose gold colour.