Nathalie Obadia

Biography

Nathalie Obadia is born in 1962 in Toulouse. She had wanted to run a gallery since she was a child. Her parents were early collectors of artists from Narrative Figuration and Pop Art. They passed on their passion for contemporary art to their daughter by bringing her to museums and galleries.

When a teenager, Nathalie Obadia took advantage of her first internship opportunities to learn about gallery management at Daniel Varenne, in Genova, and Adrien Maeght, in Paris. After a master in law and graduating from the Paris Institute of Political Studies, she worked at the Galerie Daniel Templon from 1988 to 1992.

In 1993 Nathalie Obadia opened her first gallery in the Marais in Paris. In this 40 square-metre space she showed work by the new generation of French artists, including Carole Benzaken (Prix Marcel Duchamp, 2004), Valérie Favre and Pascal Pinaud, who were later joined by numerous international artists, notably the American Jessica Stockholder, the German Albert Oehlen, the British Fiona Rae and the Filipino Manuel Ocampo.

In 1995 she moved into a much larger space close to the Centre Pompidou where she resolutely backed her artistic choices and intuitions on the world art market, exhibiting artists like Frank Nitsche and Lorna Simpson, whose first French exhibitions she mounted, or supporting confirmed figures like Jean-Marc Bustamante, Wim Delvoye and Shirley Jaffe.

In 2003 the gallery moved to its current address at 3 Rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, a space of 500 square metres well suited to showcasing the work of new artists like Joana Vasconcelos, Huma Bhabha, Guillaume Bresson, Michael DeLucia, Jorge Queiroz, Luc Delahaye (Prix Pictet, 2012), Chloe Piene, Patrick Faigenbaum and Rina Banerjee. In addition to this forward-looking work, the gallery, now a reference on the contemporary art circuit, revisited the historic contribution of abstract minimalist Martin Barré (d. 1993). In 2010 two major figures joined the gallery: filmmaker Agnès Varda and artist Sarkis, who thus benefited from new modes of exhibition and international visibility. In 2008 the Galerie Nathalie Obadia was one of the first to open premises in Brussels, Belgium.

Nathalie Obadia continued the development of her gallery with the opening of a new space in Paris, in Rue du Bourg Tibourg in 2013, twenty years after the creation of her original space in 1993. This addition provides artists and collectors with a new range of possibilities for exhibition and cements her position at the forefront of the contemporary art scene. The gallery list was further extended with new artists Xu Zhen, Fabrice Hyber (Lion d’Or at the Venice Biennale in 1997), Valérie Belin (Prix Pictet 2015), Joris van de Moortel, Mickalene Thomas, Andres Serrano, Edgar Arceneaux and Laure Prouvost (Turner Prize, 2013). Since 2013 the gallery has also represented Eugène Leroy, who died in 2000.

Artists from the gallery appear regularly in the programmes of prestigious cultural venues. Notably, Manuel Ocampo, who represented the Pavilion of the Philippines at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Sarkis who represented Turkey at the same event, and Joana Vasconcelos, who was shown in the Portuguese Pavilion, the same year that Valérie Belin was given a solo show at the Centre Pompidou. Andres Serrano was shown at the Musées Royaux de Belgique (Brussels), and Lorna Simpson at the Jeu de Paume. In 2018 the Centre Pompidou will mount a large solo exhibition dedicated to the work of Martin Barré.

Nathalie Obadia was the Vice-presidente of the Comité des galeries d’art from 2005 to 2008.

Since 2015, Nathalie Obadia gives a class of Analysis of the Contemporary Art Market at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Science po, Paris).

Participation in art fairs

Galerie Nathalie Obadia exhibits regularly at leading art fairs, notably the three Art Basel events (Basel, Miami, Hong Kong), FIAC (Paris), The Armory Show (New York City), Art Dubai (Dubai), Artgenève (Geneva), Frieze (New York City), Art Brussels (Brussels), and Paris Photo (Paris).

Honors

Represented artists