​Meet the artist Dominique Arpa-Cirpka during Watches & Wonders at the ArtyA Genève booth (La Place)


The Philippe Dufour Simplicity is a timepiece revered in the world of high-precision watchmaking. This unique model takes the idea of elegance and refinement to the next level with a truly exceptional dial. Conceived and created by artist Dominique Arpa-Cirpka, the watch face stands out for its bold use of genuine butterfly wings, transformed into a horological work of art. Each wing is meticulously crafted to capture its fragile, fleeting beauty while creating a mesmerizing play of light. This original creation embodies a rare fusion of fine watchmaking and artistic craftsmanship. 

Every detail of the dial tells a story, encapsulating the very essence of nature within an haute horlogerie timepiece. Housed in a 37 mm rose gold case, the soft curves frame the dial’s beauty in ideal proportions. This case harmonizes perfectly with the refined mechanical movement inside—a hand-wound caliber by Philippe Dufour, meticulously hand-finished to deliver not only outstanding precision but also exceptional aesthetic refinement.


Established in Collonge-Bellerive, just outside Geneva, Dominique Arpa-Cirpka has been drawing and painting since childhood. In 1983, she studied Fine Arts in Zurich and was awarded the Chinet Prize in 1984. From 1987 to 1990, she attended the Germinal workshop led by Swiss painter Jacques Walther, from the neighboring canton of Vaud, who regarded her as his most gifted student and arranged her first solo exhibition. During this period, she also traveled extensively through India, Africa, the Middle East, and the South Pacific—journeys that inspired three major exhibitions in Switzerland between 1996 and 2005. In 2001, following the birth of her third child, she opened her own studio, L’Esquisse, in Collonge-Bellerive.
Since 2009, she has collaborated on the creation of artistic watch dials, initially for RJ Watches with the "Moon-Dust DNA" project, and later for the independent brand ArtyA Geneva, applying unique artistic techniques to the world of watchmaking.


“In 2009, my husband Yvan Arpa founded his own haute horlogerie brand, ArtyA. Since then, I’ve been involved in creating one-of-a-kind artistic dials for the Son of Arts collection. All the techniques I use come from the art world—most of them are unprecedented in watchmaking. The materials vary widely, from butterfly wings to gold leaf, from pigments to paint to collage, seaweed, and more.”


Dominique Arpa-Cirpka


Meet artist Dominique Arpa-Cirpka and discover her unique creations during Watches & Wonders at the ArtyA Genève space (La Place).

Explore the artist’s full portfolio at www.cirpka.com
Discover the ArtyA Art Butterfly collections at www.artya.com/collection-art
 

Helping, giving, and supporting are essential actions that embody the feeling of solidarity with those in distress. Grand or modest, these actions can bring hope and comfort, transforming lives. To be human is to show empathy and compassion—to actively seek to support those in need, to ease their daily struggles and help build a better future.


All proceeds from the sale will be donated in full to the Foundation to support essential charity projects. This is the spirit of this exceptional auction, which brings together master watchmakers and collectors, united in their desire to provide concrete support to those most in need.


Philippe and Elisabeth Dufour said:


“We all come from somewhere, we all have a story, and we can all be bearers of hope. Beyond differences in color, culture, belief, and ethnicity, we all suffer in the face of adversity. Suffering knows no boundaries, and neither does poverty. In the face of these hardships, we are all equals. We do not claim to save the entire world, but together, we can make a difference. May tears be transformed into optimism with our selfless help, and may every heart, where boundless kindness resides, remind us of our shared humanity. We extend our heartfelt thanks to the watchmaking community that supports our cause and shares our values for this second charity auction, as well as to Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo and their entire team. With them, we are confident that the spirit of solidarity will continue to thrive.”


The watches can be viewed online and at Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo in Geneva in the weeks leading up to the sale, which will take place on May 10, 2025, at the Hôtel Président in Geneva. For more details on the auction, registration, and watch previews, please visit phillips.com or contact the Phillips Watches Department.

"Francesco Vezzoli presents KARL GOES TO MEMPHIS—Tributeo, a historic encounter in Monte Carlo."
Francesco Vezzoli was born in 1971, in Brescia, Italy. He studied at the Central St. Martin’s School of Art in London. One of the most successful contemporary Italian artists, his work can be described as a series of strong allegories about contemporary culture, with a rich subtext of elaborate references involving video installations, petit-point embroideries, photography, live performances, media experiments, and—most recently—classical sculpture. His works have been selected four times at the Venice Biennale: at the 49th, 51st, and 52nd art editions held in 2001, 2005, and 2007, respectively, and at the 2014 Architecture Biennial. His works have also been featured in other international exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial 2006, the 26th Biennale in Sao Paulo, the 6th International Biennale in Istanbul, and Performa (2007 and 2015). He has also held solo shows around the world in venues such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, US; Tate Modern, London, UK; MOCA, Los Angeles, US; MoMA PS1 in New York, US; MAXXI, Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo, Rome, Italy; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Kunsthalle, Wien, Vienna, Austria; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; The Garage CCC, Moscow, Russia; The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; Museo Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Fondazione Museion in Bolzano, Italy and NMNM - Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. His work has been shown, among others, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Gallery in London, the Palais in Paris, the Moderna Novecento in Milan, the Grassi - François Pinault Foundation in Venice, the Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, the De Witte Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, the Museum in Zurich, the Weimer, the Hangar Bicocca in Milan, and the National Picasso in Paris.

He produced a live opera performance for the 40th anniversary of Centre Pompidou, and in 2019 he brought the exhibition 'Huysmans Critique d’Art: De Degas à Grünewald, sous le Regard de Francesco Vezzoli' at Muséee d’Orsay in Paris. In 2021, Vezzoli worked with Fondazione Brescia Musei on the exhibition project Palcoscenici Archeologici,' and again that year he was the protagonist of the 'Francesco Vezzoli in Florence exhibition, with two new sculptures in Piazza della Signoria and Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. This made him the first living Italian artist to produce a site-specific work for Piazza della Signoria, creating an interaction between contemporary art and the city’s historical heritage. His latest exhibitions, 'VITA DVLCIS: fear and desire in the Roman Empire' at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome and Museums of Tears' at Museo Correr in Venice, allowed him to relate his recent artworks, respectively, to Roman archaeological masterpieces and Italian historical paintings. Vezzoli had solo shows at Museo Correr, Venice, Italy; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy; Collection Lambert, Avignon, France; Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; MoMA PS1, New York, US; MOCA, Los Angeles, US, among others. Francesco Vezzoli's work is included in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, US; Museum of Contemporary Art—CA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles US; Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; Collection Lambert, Avignon, France; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels, Belgium; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy; Collection Pinault, France; MUSEIONN, Bolzano, Italy; MAXXI, Rome, Italy; Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Tate Modern, London, UK; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, US. Francesco Vezzoli will have a solo show at the Modern Art Museum of Shanghai in April 2025.

March 20–May 44, 2025 | Monaco In March 2025, Almine Rech Monaco will inaugurate an exhibition featuring new works by Francesco Vezzoli. The show draws from one of the most original episodes in the history of 20th-century design—an encounter between two giants of contemporary creativity: the visionary Karl Lagerfeld and Memphis, founded by Ettore Sottsass. In the early 1980s, Lagerfeld moved to Monte Carlo. He settled in the Roccabella building, designed by Gio Ponti. Unsatisfied with an ordinary home, Lagerfeld decided to furnish the apartment exclusively with Memphis products. Known for its bold, avant-garde, and provocative style and guided by Sottsass, the brand envisioned a truly extraordinary space where furniture, ceramics, lighting, and decorations coalesced into one surreal and provocative aesthetic. During the early years of Lagerfeld’s tenure at Chanel, he redefined the house’s identity with a modern revival of its classic codes. Drawing inspiration from Coco Chanel’s designs of the 1920s and 30s, he introduced a contemporary vision centered on a black-and-white palette and a refined minimalism. In stark contrast, Lagerfeld’s Monaco apartment was a riot of bold colors, clashing shapes, synthetic materials, and graphic 1980s patterns. Francesco Vezzoli will create eight new pieces on the occasion of this show: embroidered portraits of Lagerfeld, displayed in opulent baroque frames. These “emotional” works, inspired by photographs of Lagerfeld from that early period, offer a rare glimpse into his most authentic and spontaneous self. They portray a different Lagerfeld from the figure widely recognized today—an individual who loved nightclubs, the social scene, and the cultural exchanges that defined his era.

​The exhibition seeks to recreate, as faithfully as possible, the ambiance of Lagerfeld’s iconic apartment within Almine Rechh Monaco. With the collaboration of Memphis Milano, a unique edition of the pieces originally designed for Lagerfeld's residence will be produced, allowing visitors to immerse themselves in one of the most eccentric and creative visions of 1980s design. To enrich the project, a catalog designed by the celebrated graphic duo Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag—M/M (Paris)—will be published.

"It is nearly impossible to find, in the history of 20th-century art and architecture, a creative collision as all-encompassing and intoxicating as the one that exploded in 1980, when Karl Lagerfeld entrusted the Memphis group with the aesthetic vision for his living space in Monte Carlo. This exhibition seeks to celebrate that utopian and surreal union—an exhilarating, unrepeatable marriage of radical design and uncompromising vision. By revisiting this extraordinary moment, we aim to honor the boldness and imagination that reshaped not only a space but also the very boundaries of art, fashion, and interior design." — Francesco Vezzoli

 "For Memphis, this project represents the closing of a full circle—one that began in Monte Carlo and now returns there. Francesco Vezzoli, a passionate admirer and connoisseur of the brand, offers his own interpretation of Memphis’s first great devotee, Karl Lagerfeld, through a contemporary lens. Vezzoli channels the enduring spirit of Memphis, reimagining an important chapter in its history with his unique and disruptive vision—one that stays true to Sottsass and his fellows original boldness and creativity." — Charley Vezza, CEO of Memphis

With around a hundred works from the Pinault Collection, the Bourse de Commerce is presenting the exhibition ‘Corps et âmes’, an exploration of the representation of the body in contemporary art. From Auguste Rodin to Duane Hanson, Georg Baselitz to Ana Mendieta, David Hammons to Marlene Dumas, Arthur Jafa to Ali Cherri, some forty artists explore the links between body and mind through painting, sculpture, photography, video and drawing.


"The Passage de la Bourse de Commerce is home to works by Ali Cherri, a Lebanese artist living in France. In his youth, he was marked by the civil war in Lebanon, and in particular by the spoliations, thefts and trafficking of works of art that wars engender. Using the twenty-four display cases, the museum's most important device for presenting objects, his work is also inspired by cinema and its twenty-four images per second: his sculptures are thought of as ghostly flashes in a liminal space between life and death, between the past and the present, inviting us to reflect on the age-old manipulation of cultural artefacts."
— Emma Lavigne, General Director of the Collection, General Curator

"'Then came the cinema to bring bodies back to life', writes Ali Cherri. The history of cinema is a history of the dead surviving in images. Cinema has always been about ghosts, whether for technical reasons (light projection, cross-fading), genealogical reasons (influences of phantasmagoria and the magic lantern), or above all poetic reasons (the characters on the screen die and are resurrected with each projection). By recording and preserving the traces of bodies, cinema thus becomes a means of bringing the dead back to life through the screen, awakening the souls of inert bodies 1 . In his film Somniculus (2017) shot in Paris, Ali Cherri seized on this spectral dimension of film by replacing the actors’ bodies with works of art and objects filmed in empty museums.

Reversing the recurrent analogy between museums and cemeteries, especially in the postcolonial context (Les statues meurent aussi, by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Ghislain Cloquet, 1953), Ali Cherri prefers to see these objects as temporarily asleep - Latin for light sleep, somniculus - and the museum as a dormitory 2 . Continuing this project, sculptures and artefacts arranged in the manner of miniature tableaux vivants slumber or awaken in each of the showcases in the Bourse de Commerce. [...] Combining archaeological finds with his own creations, he creates chimeras. 'The grafts I make in my series of sculptures are a form of solidarity between broken, fragmented and abused bodies, which, by joining together, create a community,' he says. These objects, resurrected or survivors of tumultuous pasts, scraps that museums have not deemed worthy of preserving, bear witness to countless exchanges and peregrinations: eyes torn from Egyptian sarcophagi, counterfeits when they become fashionable in European collections, fake curiosities and copies from Antiquity merge, as distant civilisations cohabit and take root in each other". — JeanMarie Gallais Curated by Jean-Marie Gallais, Curator, Pinault Collectio