Hans Mayer Gallery

Hans Mayer Gallery was a Düsseldorf art venue recorded in Andy Warhol’s diary during a November 1980 visit and a March 1981 European trip. The entries connect it to an exhibition opening and to the public work surrounding Warhol’s art—interviews, photographs, and appearances—rather than offering a formal account of the gallery’s history or administration.

Düsseldorf opening

On November 7, 1980, Warhol wrote of attending an opening at Hans Mayer’s gallery after a long drive to Düsseldorf. The visit unfolded amid an unusual encounter: an artist described in the diary as a “crazy artist” drew Warhol and Christopher Makos into a bathroom, where he made Warhol pose in a shower and photographed him with a Polaroid. Warhol also described being made to remove his shoes so that the artist could photograph his feet. The episode turned an opening-night visit into an awkward performance in which Warhol, usually the image-maker, became the subject of someone else’s camera.

The diary gives no exhibition title or detailed account of the works on view at Hans Mayer’s gallery that evening. Its emphasis instead falls on the bodily staging and the photographer’s control of the scene: Warhol was positioned on the shower floor and photographed from an angle he found humiliating and absurd. The contrast with his own carefully managed portrait practice—selecting images and retouching subjects to shape their appearance—makes the incident a pointed reversal, without establishing any further connection between the two artists’ methods.

Exhibition and publicity in Munich

On March 9, 1981, Warhol recorded visiting a gallery in Munich for a small exhibition of his glittery Shoes. He then had to return to the hotel for interviews and photographs for a German newspaper. The diary does not explicitly identify that Munich gallery as Hans Mayer Gallery, so the entry documents a related European exhibition-and-publicity itinerary, not a confirmed second visit to the Düsseldorf venue.

The day’s schedule extended from the exhibition and press work to a dinner organized by a group calling itself the “2,000”: twenty men planned to buy 2,000 bottles of Dom Perignon, seal them away, and open them in the year 2000. Warhol noted the gathering’s running joke about who would still be alive to drink the champagne. In the sequence, the gallery appearance belongs to a broader public circuit where art, press attention, and social ceremony followed one another in quick succession.

Warhol’s portrait-making practice

The diary’s account of Warhol’s wider working method helps clarify the image-centered world in which his gallery appearances took place. For a commissioned portrait, he began by taking about sixty Polaroids with a Polaroid Big Shot. He narrowed those images to four, which a screen printer transferred to 8-by-10-inch acetates; Warhol then chose one, determined its crop, and altered the face to make the sitter more attractive, adjusting features and complexion before enlarging the image to a 40-by-40-inch acetate for silkscreening.

Assistants prepared rolls of canvas in different flesh-toned backgrounds for men’s and women’s portraits. Warhol traced the chosen image onto the canvas, painted selected colored areas, and aligned the silkscreen with those painted passages. Small differences in alignment produced the portraits’ characteristic shifting effect. The described process makes the image a constructed object rather than a transparent record: selection, cosmetic alteration, transfer, color, and registration all intervene between the sitter and the finished portrait. It also provides a useful contrast to the Düsseldorf bathroom episode, where Warhol’s own body and shoes became material for another photographer’s image-making.