Since she launched her eponymous gallery in Paris in 1993 after a stint working at Galerie Daniel Templon, French gallerist Nathalie Obadia has climbed the ranks of the international art scene to become one of Europe’s most respected and influential gallerists.

Galerie Nathalie Obadia has an impressive stable of artists to its name including the likes of Rina Banerjee, Luc Delahaye, Fiona Rae, Sarkis, and Martin Barré and is renowned for having organized the first solo shows of artists such as Lorna Simpson and Enoc Perez who are now established stars.

In 2008 Galerie Nathalie Obadia expanded into Belgium with a new gallery space at 8 rue Charles Decoster in Brussels and in 2013, the 20^th anniversary of the gallery, Obadia opened another Paris space at 18 rue du Bourg-Tibourg.

As Nathalie Obadia was preparing for a major exhibition in Paris of the work of Indian-born Manhattan-based artist Rina Banerjee (see slideshow here) which is currently on show at the gallery’s Bourg-Tibourg space, BLOUIN ARTINFO got in touch with Obadia and asked her a few questions.

Name: Nathalie Obadia

Hails from: Paris, France

Director of: Galerie Nathalie Obadia

Gallery’s specialty: contemporary art

Artists represented:

Brook Andrew, Barry X Ball, Rina Banerjee, Martin Barré, Valérie Belin, Carole Benzaken, Guillaume Bresson, Ricardo Brey, Rosson Crow, Luc Delahaye, Michael DeLucia, Jean Dewasne, Patrick Faigenbaum, Roland Flexner, Fabrice Hyber, Shirley Jaffe, Sophie Kuijken, Thomas Lerooy, Eugène Leroy, Meuser, Youssef Nabil, Frank Nitsche, Manuel Ocampo, Enoc Perez, Chloe Piene, Pascal Pinaud, Laure Prouvost, Jorge Queiroz, Fiona Rae, Sarkis, Pieter Schoolwerth, Mithu Sen, Andres Serrano, Lorna Simpson, Jessica Stockholder, Mickalene Thomas, Nicola Tyson, Joris Van de Moortel, Jeffrey Vallance, Agnès Varda, Brenna Youngblood, Xu Zhen by MadeIn Company.

What exciting shows do you have planned for the remainder of 2015, from August onwards?

In Paris we will hold an exhibition of the very important French painter Eugène Leroy who died in 2000 and who hasn't had a personal exhibition in a gallery since 2008. Later in Paris we will present an exhibition of one of the best Afro-American artists, Edgar Arceneaux. In Brussels we will show the major German sculptor Meuser, and in November we will present Mickalene Thomas’s first exhibition in Belgium.

Describe the vision of the gallery and how the program is developed?

Nowadays, a gallerist must have an international vision in both their program and their actions, such as with participation in foreign fairs. But my role in both of the countries I work, in Paris and in Brussels, is to promote our national and foreign artists to the local public. The gallery has to remain the space of reference and of meeting where we are at the disposal of the collectors, art critics, and curators to make our artistic commitments known. I have never thought that galleries would be less necessary with the competition with art fairs and auctions houses. On the contrary; they are an essential meeting places where the artist can express himself with the most amount of freedom.

What have been some of the most significant achievements and landmark moments of the gallery?

This year was particularly rich; a large number of the gallery’s artists participated in important institutional exhibitions – artists such as as Lorna Simpson, Ricardo Brey, and Sarkis who represented Turkey at the Venice Biennial. Valérie Belin had her first exhibition at the Centre Pompidou; Fabrice Hyber is the subject of a very complete monograph on 30 years of his pictorial work at the CRAC of Sète; Laure Prouvost has her first personal exhibition in a museum in France, at the Museum of Rochechouart; and Thomas Lerooy, a young Belgian sculptor has inaugurated the program of contemporary art in the Petit Palais in Paris this spring.

How has the art market changed since you entered the business?

The market has become more and more international, structured, and top heavy. It has become a two-speed market with very fast successes with important prices on one side, and on the other side a more serious market with proper prices which evolve regularly with the legitimization of the artists thanks to exhibitions in museums and acquisitions by serious collections.

What was the last piece of art that thoroughly impressed you and why?

After a journey in New England where the wealth of museums is impressive, I thought that the painting “Rétroactive” 1964 by Robert Rauschenberg in the Wasdsforth Athenaeum, Harftford (CT) was a masterpiece. At the same time very beautiful, moving, and very interesting, it summarizes America between the dream of the conquest (astronauts) and the reality (murdered Kennedy). It shows the strength and the fragility of the nation of America with an outstanding destiny.

What has been your most memorable moment as a gallerist?

February 6th, 1993; my gallery's first day of opening. It was my dream since I was a teenager. Every day since then is an inexhaustible adventure.

If you weren’t a gallerist, you’d probably be ….

Lawyer, journalist, business, but overall related to international economics and political systems.

Art is….

Art is an inexhaustible source of reflection.

French auction house Artcurial has announced that it will be auctioning the Islamic art collection of Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent on October 31, 2015 in the salons of the Palace Es Saadi in Marrakech. Titled “A Moroccan Passion,” the sale is Artcurial’s first in Morocco and will be held in aid of the Jardin Majorelle Foundation.

Pierre Bergé said, “The Jardin Majorelle Foundation, which I chair, will be selling all these carefully chosen pieces. The proceeds from this sale will enable us to continue improving the garden and to welcome, in the best possible fashion, the numerous visitors which last year amounted to almost 800,000,”

“They will also help finance the Yves Saint Laurent museum that will open in 2017, in the new cultural centre near the garden and to pursue the various cultural, educational and social activities that the Jardin Majorelle Foundation has been supporting in Morocco since its creation in 2011,” Pierre Bergé added.

“A Moroccan Passion” features almost 180 items of Moroccan art from the Jardin Majorelle Museum spanning weapons, embroidery, cloth, ceramics, jewellery, carpets, and architectural components. The sale also includes all the furniture from the museum by architect Bill Willis as well as 50 pieces of furniture and paintings from the personal collection of Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent.

Highlights include an exceptional 17th century double door from a mosque (est. €20,000 – 30,000); a this conical mokhfia dish, Fez, late 17th century, used for serving couscous (est. €5,000 – 6,000); a gold bird tiara (Fez 20th century), set with diamonds and emeralds (est. €8,000 – 10,000); and a glass mosque lamp, Austrian School, Lobmeyer, late 19th century (est. €8,000 – 10,000).

For more information visit the Artcurial website here.

In many ways, Patricio Guzman has been making the same movie for more than 35 years. At least his films are all haunted by the same moment, the same rupture, in the same place: Chile, September 11, 1973. That was the day the army (aided by the United States acting behind the scenes) staged a coup d’état, ousting the elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and establishing the dictatorial reign of General Augusto Pinochet. The new right-wing junta declared that Allende had committed suicide by shooting himself with a rifle. But, like the “disappearance” of an estimated 17,000 people under Pinchot’s rule, this official story was generally assumed to be a lie, with the real truth suppressed. Such secrecy made the terror in Chile more frightful and difficult to shake.

Guzman’s works, often discussed but, with the exception of a few recent titles, seldom seen, have been brought together in the eight-DVD set “Five Films by Patricio Guzman,” released by Icarus Films. The main attraction is “The Battle of Chile” (1976–79), the work with which Guzman began his career as a documentarian and which overshadows the rest of his corpus. Broken up into three parts — “The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie,” “The Coup d’État,” and “Popular Power” — the film traces, with unbridled urgency, the revolution taking place in the streets, from bus strikes to protests, against the background of government talks. The camera weaves in and out of crowds, those behind it cornering people, shoving a microphone in their faces to ask their opinion on what’s happening, taking the country’s political temperature.

Taken as a whole, “The Battle of Chile” remains a dangerous, even shocking work. The first-person documentation of what is happening — infused with desperation because the filmmakers cannot be sure they will be there the next day — is embedded in a sprawling narrative that explodes in every direction. We see a cameraman get shot, still a striking image in an age of hyperviolence; another cameraman, Jorge Muller, to whom the film was dedicated, was arrested and quickly “disappeared.” The late French director Chris Marker had to help out with film stock when the crew ran out and was unable to procure more. And when the movie was completed, the makers had to smuggle themselves and the cans of film out of the country.

Guzman returns often to this moment in history. It poses an unanswerable question to which he nevertheless continues to search for answers with his camera. His career can be split in two unequal parts, which could be termed the event and the memory. “The Battle of Chile” trilogy pertains to the event, a jittery, real-time document of what happened. The rest of his oeuvre is concerned with what people choose to remember about what happened, how they deal with the trauma, and how silence has damaged the country as much as the original coup.

“The Pinochet Case” (2001), included in the set, is a more traditional documentary, a mode that Guzman settled into later in life. Calmer, more condensed, more ruminative than the cinema-vérité “Battle of Chile,” it follows the case against Pinochet after his arrest for human rights violations in 1998. In “Chile, Obstinate Memory” (1997), Guzman returns to his native country to show “The Battle of Chile” to kids who were too young to understand what was happening when it was made and have never seen what Guzman’s camera captured.  “Salvador Allende” (2004) is Guzman’s attempt to craft a portrait of Chile’s famous leader that has never existed, to bring sound to the silence that surrounds his legacy.

Even “Nostalgia for the Light” (2011), ostensibly a documentary about Guzman’s connection to astrology, archeology, and the Atacama Desert, becomes, after not much time, a film about what lies under the soil — namely, the bodies of many of the “disappeared,” which are still being found. Like much of his other work, it is concerned with what and how we remember, and the struggle to never forget.

But if all Guzman’s works are anchored in the one seminal historical event, that is not to say that he just repeats himself, following in his own footsteps. His movies are about the search for answers, about filmmaking as a way to respond to trauma, as a tool of remembrance and meditation and political action. As long as he continues to make films, we’ll never forget what happened.

In its September issue, Art+Auction compiled a list of the 25 most collectible midcareer artists working today. This month, ARTINFO will publish one installment from the feature per day. Click here to read Art+Auction editor-in-chief Eric Bryant’s introduction to the list. To see all the installments published so far, click here.

Kay Rosen |  b. 1944  |  United States

Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, is a place rife with conflict. It is also the inspiration behind Rosen’s 2012 text work Between a Rock and a Hard Place, which spells out the name of the city in big, gray block letters bookended by the letters C and D in white paint. It is the absence of half of the phrase that catches the viewer’s attention. Purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago for $75,000 from a 2012 show in New York at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., the piece is emblematic of how Rosen plays with language to social and political effect.

Recently, the artist filled a billboard with the word WARNING—the first N bearing a conspicuous extra stroke in bright red paint that imparted a double reading, WARMING. Titled This Means War…, the piece was commissioned by Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh.

The artist traces her obsession with language to her childhood in Corpus Christi, Texas, where she heard Spanish and English on the streets and Yiddish spoken by her grandmother at home. Such early exposure to what Rosen has referred to as the “athleticism of language” led her to pursue languages at Tulane and linguistics at Northwestern.

Prices for the artist’s prints, issued in editions of 25 to 125, range from $500 to $3,000; paintings sell for $30,000 to $50,000, though larger, multi-panel works can bring $100,000. “She’s underappreciated, but we’re working to change that,” says Meg Malloy, a partner at Sikkema Jenkins. The artist is also represented by Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston.

The Biennale Internazionale di Antiquariato di Firenze has unveiled a bold intervention that juxtaposes two sculptured by Jeff Koons with architecture and artworks of the Florentine Renaissance, including works by Donatello (1386-1466) and Michelangelo (1475-1564).

Initiated by Fabrizio Moretti, director of the Biennale and curated by art historian Sergio Risaliti, “Jeff Koons: In Florence” is on show until December 28, 2015 in the Room of the Lilies at Palazzo Vecchio and at the Piazza della Signoria

The centerpiece of the intervention is the installation of Jeff Koons’ monumental 3-metre-tall mirror-polished stainless steel sculpture “Pluto and Proserpina” in front of the Piazza della Signoria alongside a marble copy of Michelangelo’s “David.”

According to the Biennale, “the two figures of Pluto and Proserpina, which cling to each other in a dramatic and sensual embrace, will shine in the daylight and, illuminated by night, are bound to create a jarring contrast with the pieces in marble and bronze in the square.”

The second of the Koons Sculptures, “Gazing Ball (Barberini Faun)” 2013, has been placed in the Room of the Lilies at Palazzo Vecchio next to an original bronze sculpture by Donatello of “Judith and Holofernes” (ca. 1457-64).

Koons explains that his Gazing Ball series is based on the philosopher’s gaze, starting with transcendence through the senses, but directing one’s vision (the philosopher’s gaze) towards the eternal through pure form and ideas.

“I’ve thought about the gazing ball for decades. I’ve wanted to show the affirmation, generosity, sense of place, and joy of the senses that the gazing ball symbolizes. The Gazing Ball series is based in transcendence,” says Koons.

“The realization of one’s mortality is an abstract thought and from there, one is able to have a concept of the external world, one’s family, community, and a vaster dialogue with humankind beyond the present.”

Promoted by the Comune di Firenze, “Jeff Koons: In Florence” is organized by Mus.e with the contribution of Camera di Commercio, Moretti Fine Art, and David Zwirner, in the collaboration with the Biennale Internazionale di Antiquariato di Firenze.

On October 12, MacDougall’s Fine Art Auctions will hold its sale of Soviet and Post-Soviet art, the first combined auction of Soviet and Post-Soviet art to hit the market. It will also be the house’s first auction in a series of mid-season sales dedicated to Russian art.

Roughly 177 lots will be offered—spanning paintings and porcelain by Russian artists from the late 1920s to the early 2000s—and the house expects to bring in a total of more than £3.5 million ($5.3 million). The majority of works come from several major Western collections of Russian and Soviet art, and estimates range from £1,500 ($2,300) to £2 million ($3.1 million), with most lots valued at £15,000 ($23,000).

The auction will offer works bridging nearly every major 20th century art movement in Russia and the Soviet Union. Work by artists from the Academy of Fine Arts of the USSR, including Arkady Plastov and Dmitri Nalbandian will be available, along with Soviet Nonconformist artists Vladimir Nemukhin, founder of the Lianozov group, and Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg. Work by members of the Society of Easel-Painters (OST) will also be represented, including by Aleksandr Deineka and Yuri Pimenov.

The headliner is Aleksandr Deineka’s oil “Behind the Curtain” from 1933, which features a nude female lurking behind dark panels.  Due to the nudity in the work, the painting was never exhibited, but gifted to the artist’s friend Fedor Bogorodsky. With an estimate of £2 million ($3.1 million) to £3 million ($4.6 million), the painting is an example of the Soviet proclamation of the absence of sex in the USSR. Nikolai Terpsikhorov’s 1947 oil “Letter from the Front”—an emotional work that shows two characters seated at a table, a girl reading a soldier’s letter, and a more mature woman seated on the left—has an estimate of £60,000 ($92,000) to £90,000 ($137,000). Of several works entering the market for the very first time, highlights include Oscar Rabin’s dark colored painting “Bread at the Cemetery” from 1964, which has an estimate of £30,000 ($46,000) to £50,0000 ($76,000).

If the aim of art is to turn heads, involve the spectator, entertain, provoke and challenge perceptions, then Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster is going the right way.

Remember her bunk beds at the Tate, offering shelter amid the threat of nuclear disaster and with a Louise Bourgeois spider looming over all? (The installation was part of the Unilever Series in the Turbine Hall in 2009.)

Or her Bob Dylan images, recalling his “Subterranean Homesick Blues” era, carrying cryptic banners such as the single word “Because”?

The Centre Pompidou looks both back and forward with the French artist, presenting some 30 connected works in spaces both inside and outside of the museum.

Along the way there are many specially-created areas full of sounds and visions, covering the years 1887 to 2058.

The visons are variously biographical or dystopian.

Born in Strasbourg in 1965, Gonzalez-Foerster presents rooms, personal and more public, with fragmented pieces of film, books and music along the way that touch on fashion and history.

The display builds on her solo shows at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2007, and the Palacio de Cristal of Madrid in 2014.

A helpful timeline references some of the key events she follows, starting with the 1887 construction of the Splendide Hotel Constructed of iron and glass, the Spanish capital’s own Crystal Palace was built by Ricardo Velázquez Bosco, just as Arthur Rimbaud found himself in Aden. Visitors can sit in rocking chairs and read books provided about the history and spot the connections.

Gonzalez-Foerster moves on to reference the inauguration of Brasilia - the artist lives in Rio de Janeiro and Paris. She also picks up on the Marcel Duchamp exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. She won Le Prix Marcel Duchamp for her career’s work in 2002.

The sensual M.2062 is an “opera in the making” developed at different sites since 2012. More work is based on footage of the artist’s own appearance as Lola Montez at Berlin’s Cabuwazi Circus.

“Dominique  Gonzalez-Foerster 1887 - 2058“ runs through February 1, 2016, at the Pompidou Center (Centre Pompidou) in Paris.

John Constable’s masterpiece “The Lock” will lead Sotheby’s Old Master & British Paintings Sale on December 9, 2015. Last seen on the market in 1855 and having remained in the same family collection for more than 150 years, the monumental 55 x 48 inch painting is being offered with an estimate of £8-12 million.

“The Lock” is one of a small series of landscapes known as the “Six Footers.” It depicts a bucolic scene on the River Stour in the artist’s native Suffolk and was painted in response to the huge critical acclaim the first version of the painting received when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1824. According to Sotheby’s, the painting was treasured by the artist who retained the work in his studio until the end of his life.

David Moore-Gywn, British Paintings consultant to Sotheby’s, said: “For many people, Constable captures, like no other artist, the essence and beauty of the English countryside. This is quite simply one of the most loved and celebrated works in the history of British Art and also one of a very small handful of great Constables still in private hands.”

Julian Gascoigne, Sotheby’s Senior British Pictures specialist, said: “This breath-taking painting belongs, together with The Hay Wain, to the small group of pictures that for many define Constable’s career. Constable’s absolute mastery as a landscape painter is everywhere in this picture – in the vigour of the almost impressionistic brushwork, in the drama of the clouds and the changing weather, even in the movement of the grass in the fields and the sparkle of water as it cascades through the lock. It is one of those pictures that captivates, and the more one looks, the more one sees.”