Hansjörg Mayer

Hansjörg Mayer was born in Stuttgart in 1943 to a family of printers. Growing up amid the tools and traditions of the trade, he developed an early interest in the material qualities of text and print. After completing apprenticeships in printing and typesetting, he studied at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, where philosopher Max Bense introduced him to information theory and the study of language as a system.

Language became Mayer’s material, a way for him to test how structure, chance, and precision could coexist on the printed page. In the early 1960s he used his training in typesetting to explore the visual and physical properties of text. Working with metal type, he created compositions he called “typoems,” where letters functioned as visual elements rather than words to be read. Early works such as Alphabet and 19 Typographies, both from 1962, examined rhythm and variation within tight formal limits. In 1964 he published 13 visuelle texte, marking the start of his engagement with publishing as an artistic practice. That same year he met Dieter Roth, whose experimental approach to printing inspired him to rethink the possibilities of letterpress through layering, error, and overprinting. By the mid-1960s he had begun incorporating offset and photocomposition, expanding his investigation of how systems, language, and technology shape the act of making.

In 1966 he moved to London to teach at the Bath Academy of Art and later at Watford College of Art, introducing students to new printing technologies. Through his imprint edition hansjörg mayer, his publishing work grew into an international platform for artists’ books and experimental literature, producing more than 300 titles that linked concrete poetry, conceptual art, and design. That same year he also published futura 13: Computer Grafik, featuring computer-generated drawings by Frieder Nake. Their shared grounding in information aesthetics connected Mayer’s typographic systems with Nake’s algorithmic compositions, extending his exploration of how language and technology intersect. He continued to collaborate with artists such as Eugen Gomringer, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houédard, and Roth, transforming the printed page into a space for artistic and linguistic experimentation.

Mayer’s work entered public view in the mid-1960s, when he took part in Between Poetry and Painting at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, an exhibition that introduced concrete poetry to the British art scene. Three years later, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague presented his first retrospective, recognizing the precision and inventiveness of his typographic experiments. Throughout the 1970s and 80s his prints, books, and collaborations with poets circulated internationally in exhibitions devoted to concrete and visual poetry, establishing his imprint as a central platform for experimental publishing. His later exhibitions, including The Smell of Ink at ZKM in Karlsruhe (2017) and Typoems and Artists’ Books at the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin (2019–20), traced his continuing influence across art, design, and language.