Galeries du Bailli, a shopping arcade located on Avenue Louise 195 in Brussels, housed a number of

avant-garde galleries between 1972 and 1975. These included Wide White Space, MTL, Gallery D,

Paul Maenz, Oppenheim, PLUS-KERN, Hervé Alexandre, and Editions Delta, presenting a veritable

who’s who of established, and predominantly Conceptual, artists.

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In March 1973, exhibitions were presented by Marcel Broodthaers, Joseph Kosuth, and On Kawara,

alongside a performance by Vito Acconci. The following month featured exhibitions by stanley brouwn, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Ger Van Elk, Dan Graham, and Dennis Oppenheim. Other artists who

exhibited at Le Bailli include Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Piero Manzoni, Daniel Buren, Lawrence Weiner,

Joseph Beuys, Carl Andre, David Lamelas, Donald Judd, Panamarenko, Philippe Van Snick, and

many others.

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This rich history is known through documentation preserved in public and private archives, including

photographs, invitations, articles, monographs, and exhibition catalogues. The presence and

influence of the artists who exhibited at Le Bailli during the 1970s resonate through publications

sourced from a private library, alongside archival materials directly connected to that period.

Half a century after Galeries du Bailli’s heyday of Conceptualism, WHAT DID YOU PASS ON TO ME

“retour au Bailli” returns to this historic Brussels site to reconsider artistic inheritance. Rather than

staging direct comparisons, the exhibition creates a network of ideas and forms that places

contemporary practices in dialogue with the history of the space. The tautological, performative, and

site-specific strategies that shaped Le Bailli’s 1970s legacy serve as a point of departure, but the

artists in this exhibition engage this history critically rather than reverently. Where Le Bailli once

reflected a largely masculine, Eurocentric perspective, the works in this exhibition both continue and

challenge that lineage.

Across sculpture, installation, photography, textile, painting, and sound, the artists adopt and

destabilize the formal structures of early Conceptualism. Their practices draw on craft-based,

process-oriented methods that also function within feminist and queer frameworks. They confront the

exclusions embedded in traditional art histories, emphasize the performative potential of the body,

and dissolve rigid distinctions between painting and sculpture into fluid, biomorphic, and associative

forms. Site-specificity, architecture, language, and digital media also play central roles throughout the

exhibition.

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While the historical figures of Le Bailli established a canon of intellectual rigor, their work emerged

from a particular model of spatial and formal authority. The artists in this exhibition disrupt that legacy

both conceptually and aesthetically, deliberately avoiding the detached atmosphere often associated

with Conceptual art. This exhibition is fuller, louder, and more tactile. Through fabrics, thread, digital

technologies, structural interventions, and domestic materials, the artists replace the cool distance of

early Conceptualism with embodied, active participation. In doing so, they suggest that inheritance

gains meaning not through preservation, but through revision and reinvention.

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On display is a selection of books (catalogues and monographies) of the library of Frederick Gordts,

passed on to him by his father and grandfather, about the Conceptual artists who exhibited in the

space. Books about the space, about the galleries and by the gallerists complete the selection.

Several archival pieces, mainly invitations at Bailli from the early seventies from Paul Maenz, Wide

White Space, Galerie D and MTL, are shown too, together with historical photos.