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Corridor with posters of the Gewad exhibitions
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Part of the bookshop with view on the gallery space
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There were no specialized DVD subscriptions for looking up books, and there was no Google - simply because there were as yet no computers! There were only thick books for identifying publications according to artist, theme or ISBN.
I, Hilde Peleman, had just graduated in History of Art when I started my own Copyright Bookshop. That was back in 1983.
The previous year I had worked as the manager of a bookshop of that same name, founded two years earlier and run by artist Jan Vercruysse. The opening for me came when Vercruysse decided to make art a full-time career. In 1983 I took over.
I immediately started a new section of architecture books and added a selection of art-historical classics to what used to be our core business at the time: minimal and conceptual art.
The photographs of this period were all made by Bart De Baere, now director of the Muhka Museum of Contemorary Art in Antwerp. Back in 1985 he was an art history student.