Gallery owner Nadine Gandy, a specialist in Central European and Balkan artists: “At the time, they still called me ‘comrade’!”

We met Nadine Gandy in Venice (Italy), where she often resides, on the occasion of the Architecture Biennale: she came to support the exhibitors of the French pavilion, Jakob & MacFarlane , whom she has exhibited in the past. It could also have been in Barneville-Carteret (Manche), where she owns land by the sea, which since July has hosted a building open to the public, which she calls a "double belvedere" , built from pallets and designed at her request by the designer Matali Crasset , also an old accomplice: she exhibited it in Prague (Czech Republic) in 2002 and multiplied the projects with her. And again in Bratislava, Slovakia, where she opened a gallery in 2005 , after Prague, where she had settled in 1992 to show, for the first time in a country long closed by the Iron Curtain, Araki, Buren, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Lawrence Weiner…

Why Bratislava? "It's at the center of my world ," she says. "It's in the middle of Europe. Austria is 3 kilometers away, Hungary 10, the Czech Republic 30." Venice is further away (800 kilometers), but, as with all her trips, the self-confessed claustrophobic travels there by car. While the art market often brings to mind the jet set, in her case, she's more of an explorer who wants to be able to stop off whenever she wants.

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