He actually wanted to become a doctor, but after his Matura in 1959 at the Collège Saint-Michel he studied history of art, Biblical archaeology and German literature.
He held six exhibitions a year with international as well as Swiss artists, including Gilbert & George, Martin Disler, Helmut Federle, Mario Merz and Rolf Winnewisser, whom he had already presented in Lucerne.
With a penchant for painting, Ammann presented Enzo Cucchi, Nicola de Maria, Francesco Clemente, Walter Dahn, Rainer Fetting, Georg Baselitz in Basel.
In 1988 he opened the Kunsthalle to Richard Serra, who covered each of the long side walls of the skylight hall with a strip of the densest graffiti hatching and achieved a fantastic change in the spatial effect.
The new museum gained international renown with a new form of exhibition, the "Szenenwechsel", which was held every six months and took place a total of twenty times with the help of private sponsors.
[6] During the Szenenwechsel, the museum's holdings were rearranged every six months and enriched with new acquisitions, loans or special exhibitions.
Between 2010 and 2015, he curated (with Anna Wesle) several exhibitions at the Museum Franz Gertsch in Burgdorf/Switzerland and at the Galerie Perpétuel in Frankfurt.