Konstantin Chaykin

Konstantin Chaykin was born on 23 November 1975 in Leningrad, USSR, now Saint Petersburg, Russia. As a child he was drawn to radio electronics, and he trained in radio technology and telecommunications at a technical college in Leningrad, graduating in 1995 (most sources describe this as a telecommunications college). He served in the army afterward and worked a series of jobs, including as a mechanic and in sales, before turning to watchmaking. He had no access to a watchmaking school in Russia and no mentor, so he taught himself the craft from manuals and by building his own tools and prototypes.

He founded his own manufacture in 2003 and quickly became known for mechanically inventive complications, including his Joker watch with its animated, expressive face, and for other themed pieces built around calendars, world time, and religious or cultural imagery. He became the only Russian member of the Academie Horlogere des Createurs Independants and served as its president from 2016 to 2019. His inventions have been recognized with the GPHG Audacity Prize in 2018 for the Clown watch, the WIPO Gold Medal for Inventors in 2020, and the Russian state title of Distinguished Inventor of the Russian Federation, awarded 17 November 2022.

In the 2020s, Chaykin's practice expanded visibly into painting, often as a direct extension of a watch project rather than a separate discipline. His self-portrait painting tied to the launch of his ThinKing ultra-thin watch, and later works such as A Mad Horological Party and Dormouse, have been shown at fairs and auctions alongside his timepieces. He continues to work through his own manufacture, and his practice remains closely tied to Moscow and to his native Saint Petersburg.

Coverage of Chaykin in the specialist watch and jewelry press consistently frames him as a rare crossover figure: an inventor and mechanic first, who has increasingly been treated as a painter in his own right. His election to, and later presidency of, the Academie Horlogere des Createurs Independants placed him inside the small circle that the watchmaking world treats as its most demanding peer benchmark, and the GPHG Audacity Prize and WIPO gold medal extended that recognition into wider design and intellectual-property circles. His paintings have been presented at Dubai Watch Week and offered through Phillips and Ineichen, both of which describe him as combining the roles of watchmaker, inventor, and painter in one practice. In Russia, his work has appeared in exhibitions and displays connected to major institutions, including the State Historical Museum in Moscow and a dedicated presentation at the Museum of Time and Clocks in Moscow. The recurring theme in this coverage is that his mechanical inventions and his paintings are read as a single body of work rather than as separate careers.

Chaykin's market is unusual in that it runs on two tracks, watches and paintings, often sold at the same events. The highest price recorded for any single lot by him is CHF 508,000, paid for the ThinKing and PalanKing ultra-thin watch set at Phillips' Geneva Watch Auction XXI, held in Geneva in May 2025. A companion lot at that same sale, his self-portrait painting Thinking of the Time's Birth, sold for CHF 53,340, about USD 63,000, and was described at the time as a new record for his paintings.

That painting record did not last. At an Ineichen Auctioneers session in Zurich in December 2025, the prototype of his dual sided White Rabbit transformer watch sold for CHF 420,000, and his painting A Mad Horological Party sold for CHF 90,000, which Chaykin's own manufacture described as a new personal record for his art. On 21 March 2026, the painting Dormouse sold for RUB 18,000,000 at a charity auction held by the Angels Club Foundation in Russia, the highest result of his career at Russian auctions specifically. On the watch side, a separate high point came in March 2024, when the Joker Encore Charity Piece Unique sold for RUB 40,000,000, about USD 435,000, at a Russian charity auction, reported at the time as a record for the most expensive Russian watch.

Because these results are spread across Swiss francs, US dollars, and Russian rubles, and across several auction ecosystems (international watch auctions in Geneva and Zurich, and Russian charity sales), direct year-over-year comparison is not straightforward, and the number of comparable sales remains small.

Chaykin's market is young, thin, and split across two collecting categories, watches and paintings, which makes any single result an imperfect guide to where the next one will land. There is no catalogue raisonne; verification runs through his own manufacture and, for secondary-market lots, through the selling auction house. His strongest institutional ties are in Russia, where his work has appeared in exhibitions at the State Historical Museum in Moscow and in a dedicated presentation at the Museum of Time and Clocks in Moscow; these are documented as exhibitions rather than confirmed permanent holdings, and broader confirmation of any museum's permanent collection, in Russia or the West, has not been established. For a collector, his AHCI leadership and design-world recognition are the strongest signals of durability, while the small number of public sales, spread across currencies and sale types, is the main reason to treat any individual price as a data point rather than a trend.