Nadia Candet grew up in a family of art lovers. Her grandfather, Carnig Kevorkian, an antiques dealer on Quai Malaquais in Paris and specialist in Oriental art, served as advisor to leading collectors. His brothers worked in Tehran and Bombay, London and New York, giving their name to rooms in the Metropolitan and Brooklyn museums as well as to a foundation, The Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. When her parents went to spend part of the year in the Middle East, she stayed with her grandparents in Paris in order to continue with her French education, and remembers doing her homework in her grandfather’s storeroom amidst bronzes from Luristan and Persian miniatures. Today, Nadia Candet collects contemporary art and commissions special works directly from artists. Her activity of collecting is underpinned by a desire to share. “Before now, I never really felt the need to talk about our collection. The fact of asking other collectors to express themselves on this subject of ‘private commissions’ was a way of revealing this practice, of grasping its full scope and complexity.”