The work takes center stage. The rest is a footnote.

Galleries have known it for ages: the less the wall says, the louder the work speaks. Footnote — gallery, art bookstore and bar on Sint-Salvatorstraat in Ghent — asked for a website that behaves the same way.

So we left out almost everything. No color, no decoration, no animations begging for attention. White, black, a single typeface in capitals. A menu that only appears when you ask for it.¹ What remains is room for the artists.

Every exhibition gets a start and an end date. The site knows by itself what is on view now, what is coming up and what has ended — the archive grows on its own, one exhibition at a time.²

Art, theory, architecture, photography, graphic design, zines — the art bookstore moved to the web in its entirety. Every book with its own publisher, weight, stock and category.

A plugged-in third-party cart didn’t fit that picture. We built the shop ourselves, tailored to Footnote and fully managed from the same CMS as the rest of the site.³

Checkout takes just a few steps, with payment through Mollie.⁴ Shipping is calculated per country and by weight, and in-store pickup is available too.⁵

Between the bookshelves and next to the gallery, Footnote pours natural wine. A place for conversations between neighbors, artists, architects and whoever happens to wander in. It got a page on the site too — just as calm as the rest.

¹ The menu opens as a full-screen list in large capitals, on desktop too. On the homepage, the menu is the entire page.

² Per exhibition: artists, dates, opening and a photo series. The status (upcoming, on view, archive) follows from the dates, with a manual override for exceptions.

³ Books, categories, shipping rates, orders and the text of the confirmation emails all live in the Kirby Panel. No separate shop platform, no monthly subscription.

⁴ Price and stock are re-checked on the server at every step. The shop fetches the payment status from Mollie itself instead of blindly trusting an incoming message — a paid order never counts twice.

⁵ Customers who need an invoice receive a PDF copy with their confirmation; the official invoice follows via Peppol. Shoppers can sign up for the newsletter at checkout, and the subscription only goes through once the payment is complete.

Images: exhibitions at Footnote Gallery, featuring work by Egon Van Herreweghe (The Menu, cover), Adriaan Verwee, Elke Van Kerckvoorde, Emma Mortier, Navid Nuur & Marius Lut. All works © the artists.