Hans-Jörg Mayer  Hackensack

After Hans Jörg Mayer had worked a lot on classical painting with his last exhibitions, it was now time to disavow painting again. Everything in the Hackensack (which is the name of a suburb of Manhattan) exhibition was somehow more picturesque and colorful than before. The oil or acrylic paint was missing, Mayer worked with colored prints on colored canvases.
It was was about the criticism of painting and its aspect of originality and authenticity. Pink hearts on pink cotton fabrics. Words such as ‚whirring' or ‚rustling' gave references to techno music and haze (Dunst) hovered over everything. A scrabling, which was implicit in the end of the millennium. Eight portrait format pictures hung close together.
On the ground there were works that were completely new for HJM: Ten models of buildings from Germany, made as a hybrid between paper sculpture and drawing. The selection ranged from the toughest and most horrible buildings in German history, the barracks and watchtowers of concentration camps, to the humid and cheerful Oktoberfest beer tent. Old-fashioned half-timbered houses with lookout tower referenced a romantic home, while an Aldi discounter market hall made from construction containers showed a more commercial background. A large, rationalistic ruin on the Bonn Cologne Autobahn, now blown up, shows dilapidated architecture and with the brothel in Cologne's Hornstrasse another aspect of society is included. Hans Jörg Mayer's succinct but extremely successful exhibition showed an extended portrait of the German social city landscape.