Tirdad Hashemi, Solo Exhibition Wet Plastic Fragile Heart, gb agency, Paris, 2021. Photo by Aurélien Mole
November 2023
Mahsan: What is your background and how did you come to the decision to become a gallerist?
Nathalie: I studied art history at the École du Louvre and Sorbonne and since the very beginning my specialty was contemporary art. I wanted to be a museum curator, and I didn’t want to have a gallery because I didn’t have any interest in selling or buying art. For me art should be in books or in museums. But this is the way that life transforms your path, I thought that I could study more when I was in New York, but my father became sick, and I had to come back to France. When he passed away, I didn’t have any money. So, I was working at Galerie Froment and Putman, and then I met Solene Guillier, my partner and we thought we could maybe invent another kind of gallery, a new artist program.
Mahsan: What is the main mission of your gallery and your approach to creativity?
Nathalie: For me, art must be political. I love art history like I love history and for me to understand the present, you must know the past. Art history was really a way for me to understand my contemporary time and ever since I had the opportunity to work with artists, living artists, I really help them to express what they have to say, the resistance they have towards the society where they come from, the utopia they could have.
But when we started back in 2000, it was another world. At the time, for example we were talking about the big Europe and how we would make Eastern Europe being part of the big Europe, because it was the end of the Soviet Union. So of course, we were really interested in those countries because I didn’t study them when I was studying art history, the conceptual art from Eastern Europe and it was not so well known when I was in university. We were curious about who those people were who could be part of our Europe, but we didn’t know them. So, we met people that were questioning those issues from the East. For example, Deimantas Narkevičius from Lithuania, Roman Ondák from Slovakia, Jiří Kovanda from Czech Republic, Július Koller from Slovakia and we also worked a lot with Poland. Those artists gave us knowledge of their own history.
So of course, our way to be political in 2000s was different than the way to be political today because it was more geopolitical concerns and nowadays there are some other issues, even inside France there are so many different issues we can also try to develop with the artists.
Deimantas Narkevicius, Solo Exhibition Cupboard and a Play, gb agency, Paris, 2014. Photo by Marc Domage
Deimantas Narkevicius, Solo Exhibition Cupboard and a Play, gb agency, Paris, 2014. Photo by Marc Domage
Mahsan: But do you think these issues and themes in art still have an audience today?
Nathalie: Yes always, good art always has audience. You know people are not stupid. Maybe you don’t sell but at least people like the show. People like art to open their eyes.
Mahsan: Yes, unfortunately, when we study the art market, we see that they don’t sell that much.
Nathalie: But still there are some good museums, some good collectors who try to defend that. Not to put the artwork in the middle of their living room, but at least they will support financially, and they also try to have a role in the whole system of trying to respect the artists that are telling things. But it’s rare, and it’s not what people know. People know all the big auctions, the high prices, but this is another story and issue.
Mahsan: What is your approach when it comes to choosing an artist to work with? How closely do you work with artists at gb agency?
Nathalie: When we built the program, we wanted to build a kind of specific approach. First of all, as we are both art historians, we didn’t want to be amnesiac. So, for us it was important to have few artists who are there since a long time and try to resist to the art system. For example, we went to see Robert Breer, who was born in 1926, he went through geometric abstraction movement in the 50s, kinetic art in the 60s, minimal art in the 70s, perceptual art and was also an experimental animation film maker.
We really wanted to give voice and visibility to those kinds of artists who invent things and spend all their life to experiment new things without transforming it into a selling system, people who really define that kind of detour during the 20th century, with younger people. But it was always important to balance it with the history, at least since the beginning of modern rupture. For us it was important to also include those people because again to understand our time, you need to understand the past.
Personally, I usually like it when I see a work that I don’t understand. If I understand too quickly, for me it’s not a good sign. I need to question myself and tell myself “Ah, I don’t understand this piece”. And then I try to know more about the artists and sometimes to meet them.
Robert Breer, Solo Show, gb agency, Paris, 2013. Photo by Marc Domage
Mahsan: You’re also working with an Iranian artist, Tirdad Hashemi. How did you meet her and what made you interested in her works?
Nathalie: Discovering her works happened in a very unusual way, because we never did that before. We were part of a jury at Révélations Emerige, an annual prize for young artists that we could select 12 artists at the time, but we saw maybe 800 artists, and, in the end, we chose 12 to make a show with.
We saw her works for the first time as photocopies in those files, and of course her work was totally strong already. Then we met her, and as you know her, she doesn’t talk much but this kind of silence with her was interesting for us, and we knew that we could work together so we asked her to work with us and she said yes. But I don’t know anything about Iran. I’ve never been there, and I don’t know about Iranian art. I just studied it briefly at École du Louvre. I would love to know!
Mahsan: On a geographic level, is there any region that you would like to explore more in depth?
Nathalie: Everywhere! I love Asia, I worked a lot in Thailand. I did two big shows in Thailand, in 2004 and 2018. I would love to go to the Middle East, I don’t know, everywhere. And even, I don’t know south America at all, and I would love to know more. I know a little bit about America. But even in Europe, I’ve never been to Russia. You know art is amazingly vast and big and wonderful.
Mahsan: Can you share some of your experiences while working in Thailand?
Nathalie: When I was in Thailand, I worked for two years, doing research. So, I went to see many artists’ studios, many art schools and all the museums. They were like a lot of countries, for example when you go to the National Museum, you have impressionism until the 20s, surrealism till the 60s, 70s. Everything is postponed in term of movements coming from the west.
After going through that, I understood some amazing things: In 1970 the only art historian in Thailand made a book putting together art and religion again. For him, the modernity had finished, but it was obligatory to reconnect art to religion. In Asia, in many countries, not only in Thailand, this idea of unique doesn’t exist. For example, if a temple has been damaged, you can destroy it and rebuild it, it’s not like us, we want to restore. So, with all those different kinds of issues is what is art? what is modernity? what is unique? what is not?…
For maybe one year of research, I was thinking that I cannot understand this way of thinking. After one year, I realized something, it was in a monastery that I went to see a monk who used to be an art historian. When I got there, we walked for two hours, and he talked to me all along then we came back to see a landscape. When we reached that point where we got a good view, it wasn’t extraordinary to me… and then we came back to the camp, and this time it was a ten-minute walk until we got back to the starting point. By doing that to me, he tried to explain me that in Thailand, the artists are very modern, because the work itself is not the most important thing. The work itself is a space that leads the viewer to the object. And I think in west for example, we understood that only since Marcel Duchamp. So, for us it took twenty centuries to understand that, but for Thai people, this modernity is part of themselves. So, if this object here is a piece of art, they don’t care about it because it can be destroyed and can be rebuilt the same way. And you, you are here, and this is art. And when I understood that, after one whole year, I was like “Wow!
Mahsan: Your gallery has played an important role in promoting young contemporary artists by bringing them to the European and international scene. What challenges have you experienced on this journey?
Nathalie: It was great actually. It’s tough because our program is difficult, and we never really made any compromises. So, every year, the bookkeeper was telling us to start making compromises if we wanted to continue and every time, I was telling him “No”. And I think, now the gallery is known for being uncompromising and people can trust us. Because when you do one compromise, then you open the door to many of them. So, I always preferred to have low-cost flights, bad hotels, low salary but being able to keep our program.
I think it’s much nicer and when I look back, I’m not sad, because we reached what we wanted: “freedom.” This is maybe one of the last spaces where we can be free, maybe not everywhere but at least here in France.
Mahsan: gb agency is part of the Fair Gallery structure, can you tell us more about its concept?
Nathalie: The Fair Gallery was really interesting because it was a group of four galleries. One from Poland: Raster, one from England: Hollybush Gardens, one from Belgium: Jan Mot, and us. We tried, at the beginning, as the name says “Fair Gallery” to occupy the space of fairs because we hated fairs, all of us, be we had to go through fairs to sell. So, we decided to invent this fake structure. People didn’t know at the beginning who was behind this project, and we applied to participate in the Frieze London fair as the Fair Gallery without mentioning the name of our galleries. And of course, it’s a “fair” gallery as it is in art fairs but also because it’s a fair game. It’s like you know when Július Koller, one of the conceptual artists we worked with, did a ping-pong club because for him it was all about fairness. Because it’s a game and he was creating that in the 1970s during the soviet occupation. So, he was trying to bring back a bit of humanity in those frames and rules that are not humane at all.
We did it twice in the fair, both times we paid a curator to curate a real show and then we did one more very interesting step, and this is exactly what you are doing now, creating a platform for educating upcoming curators and artists. We did the fair gallery at de Appel, a very well-known curatorial school in Amsterdam. It exists since the 90s and there are about ten young curators every year who are selected from all around the world to pass the one-year program and in the end, they do their final show. So, we were thinking how we could help young gallerists in the same way that de Appel prepares the curators. So, we proposed to de Appel to create the program of the Fair Gallery program. Of course, the four of us were working for free, and we collaborated for four years with that school. Each year we were trying to redefine the best fair way to choose among the applicants and not only the young ones. I remember we took someone from Budapest working already in a gallery, but she wanted to open her own gallery. So, we took her as a student for one year.
The program was based in Amsterdam, but the idea was to travel all around the world for one year, to introduce the students to a lot of curators, museum, collections and fairs. After my experience in Thailand, where I’d seen many wonderful young ladies who were amazing and brilliant but didn’t have the money to have a gallery or to be able to study abroad. I wanted to give them the keys and the tools to be able to go back to their own countries and to open what they want.
Some of them could make it happen. I remember a Chinese student who didn’t know anyone in the beginning, but then he could open his gallery in China. We met and worked with all of them, and we were also travelling with them, making stops in different big cities. Sometimes they were coming to Paris to work with us, it wasn’t like doing a little internship of two months, it was also about questioning. What does it mean to be a gallerist? What does it mean to show art? And it was also very important for them to build a network and have connections. So, it was a mix of knowledge, practicing and networking. For example, once we invited an old Belgian gallerist who explained an interesting subject to them about why an artwork will be a piece of art after it’s photographed and before that, it’s not an artwork.
Július Koller, The Ping Pong Club, Solo Exhibition Mini-Concepts / Maxi-ideas,
gb agency, Paris, 2012. Photo by Aurélien Mole
Július Koller, Solo Exhibition Mini-Concepts / Maxi-ideas,
gb agency, Paris, 2012. Photo by Aurélien Mole
Mahsan: Creating a program like this is my dream, as I have an altruistic motive in what I do in this world. I believe in building something meaningful where people can learn and grow together without competition—like a real community, not just a fake slogan—creating a place like Black Mountain College.
Nathalie: I think this is what you can do in Iran with your platform.
Mahsan: Yes, by starting this journey, I’m trying to reach this goal step by step. I know it will take years, but this is what I’m passionate about.
Nathalie: But we decided to stop this collaboration, because in the end, we understood that they were taking students who had money because the program was ten thousand euros a year and in addition to that, the cost of the flights, hotels and …. And of course we weren’t paid, and we didn’t want to be paid. So, we stopped the Fair gallery, we are still very close, the four of us but we stopped our activity together.
Mahsan: How’s been the response to your booth at art fairs specially Paris+ so far? How well could you attract the international collectors’ attention?
Nathalie: It depends on the fair. For example, Paris+ or Art Basel are really important fairs with a lot of foreigners coming. They aren’t coming for gb, they are coming for the fair. The last one was good for us, but Basel in June wasn’t so good. So, it depends. But I think, in general the fairs between 2013 and 2017 were important for our business and since 2018-2019 with the covid era they’re not as important as they were back then in terms of sell and meeting new people. Because back then, we were younger so the more people we knew, the better it was and it was important for us but now, it’s not so necessary.