Fifty watches. That’s the whole run of the Big Bang Soldier All Black, and every one carries Leonard Iheagwam’s toy soldiers marching across the dial in black on black. Iheagwam, the Lagos-born artist who works in London as Soldier, spent two years building this watch with Hublot. The shape is the Big Bang the brand launched in 2005. The surface belongs to him.
Printed, not painted
His motifs reach the watch through pad printing, an offset process that transfers a flat image onto curved, textured surfaces. The soldiers stay matte and ghosted, so the dial is shadow first and picture second, and the crowd doesn’t stop at the dial’s edge. It keeps marching onto the bezel.
One soldier stands still. At 9 o’clock, the running seconds hand is a single toy soldier, turning in place while the army swirls past it.
The dial is sapphire crystal, translucent enough that the printed layers float at slightly different depths. From across a room it can pass for a skeleton dial, all openwork and machinery. Up close, the trick shows. There’s no openwork here, just ink, crystal, shadow and light doing the impression.
The Big Bang underneath
Under the artwork sits a 42mm case in black ceramic, polished to a gloss in places and microblasted matte in others, with black titanium and rubber filling out the construction. At 14.5mm thick it makes no attempt to slip under a cuff unnoticed, and it isn’t trying to. Black on black is the whole point, and the two finishes are what keep it legible: gloss catches the light where the matte surfaces swallow it. The reference is 441.CI.1140.NR.HBL26.
Inside, Hublot’s HUB1280 UNICO runs the chronograph: a manufacture self-winding flyback with a column wheel and about 72 hours of power reserve.
Three straps come in the custom box. The main one is black fabric with velcro fastening, and the two rubber options, red and green, carry the only color in the package. All three swap on Hublot’s One Click system, so the green strap clicks on in seconds.
The edition stops at 50 pieces at $29,200 each, sold through Hublot boutiques by appointment. Fifty watches, and every sale starts with a booking.
Two years from a gallery wall
Iheagwam built his name on these figures. His paintings, prints and sculptures return to toy soldiers, camouflage and West African passports, pictures of migration and memory worked at the scale of play. He co-founded Motherlan, the Lagos skate collective, and collaborations with Louis Vuitton and Marni sit behind him already. Hublot showed his work at its London boutique during Frieze in 2024, and the watch grew out of that exhibition.
Editor’s take
Most artist editions paste a painting onto a dial and call it done. This one works because the art and the object want the same thing. His soldiers are about the many, not the one. The All Black treatment does that to a Big Bang, a watch you read by shape instead of shine. Fifty pieces is a gallery run, not a product line. I’d take mine on the black fabric and leave the green strap boxed. Probably.
