The career of this gallery owner was initially just as unpredictable as his list of artists later: always intuitive, vehement, sometimes surprising even for himself.
Painters, performers, dancers and video artists from living theater to pop art lined up in a shimmering staccato, sparking a driving beat of contemporary art whose dealers knew how to celebrate the visual event of pictures, but also the event of the vernissage with Aplomb.
At the same time, when he was young, he lent a hand when he roamed the country in a VW bus as a traveling salesman to place the art he was propagating with collectors.
Born in Ulm in 1940 and inspired by the teaching of Max Bill at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Hans Frieder Mayer had completed an apprenticeship as an industrial clerk in his hometown and then sold designer furniture with great success in Dortmund, when he himself had no plans for a career in the art market eyes stood.
It was the critic Albert Schulze Vellinghausen who recommended the job profile of a gallery owner to the Swabian.
Mayer's self-confidence was already evident back then when he opened his "(op) art gallery" in 1965 against the advice of his mentor, collector and FAZ author in the southern German provinces, in a former coffin warehouse in Esslingen - and for his debut the in former Bauhaus teacher Josef Albers, who lives in the United States.
He was waiting at the time, already slightly acidic,
After a brief stopover in Krefeld in the Lower Rhine region – like Mönchengladbach, it used to be a hotspot for contemporary art – Mayer began an impressive ascent in Düsseldorf in 1971.
On Grabbeplatz next to the Kunsthalle, he stirred up a gallery scene that was programmatically influenced by Alfred Schmela and Konrad Fischer, while he himself, after beginning with constructive and concrete art, stood for openness and curiosity.
The cooperation with the renowned Parisian colleague Denise René was tantamount to an accolade, which then lasted well into the 1980s.
Where Warhol and Beuys met
His close friendship with Keith Haring was of immense personal importance to Mayer, as was his high regard for Jean-Michel Basquiat – young artists in whose works Mayer saw the future and with whom he actually wanted to work long-term before they died shortly after each other.
Looking back, the first meeting of Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys in 1979, who evidently had something to say to each other right away, is emblematic of the gallery.
The photographer Peter Lindbergh had once assisted Mayer in Krefeld, who in turn later fueled his career.
Mayer was particularly closely connected to the idiosyncratic graphic work of Robert Longo.
The concerts by Kraftwerk, Steve Reich and The Who in the gallery have also gone down in the annals, giving Hans Mayer the reputation of a cross-over gallery owner.
In fact, his understanding of the zeitgeist and the present was also based on music, film and fashion.
Hans Mayer died in Düsseldorf on New Year's Eve at the age of 82.
With him, the scene loses one of the founding figures of the Rhenish art trade and Art Cologne, a gallerist who – in the parlance of an earlier generation – thought “progressively” and for whom constant change as an attitude was more important than programmatic certainty.