Johannes Schwartz - Tiergarten

Tiergarten is a striking artist’s book that explores the boundaries between documentary photography, print aesthetics, and visual abstraction.

Shot by Dutch artist Johannes Schwartz, the photographs depict meals prepared for the animals of the Moscow Zoo—raw meat, chopped vegetables, whole fish, and bread—presented not as zoological records, but as complex, visceral still lifes.

Rather than offering a clean or clinical view, Schwartz embraces the unpredictable materiality of Risograph printing. Known for its vibrant but unstable results, the technique here transforms the images into shifting, almost painterly surfaces. Colors bleed, registration misaligns, and texture becomes central—turning piles of food into near-abstract compositions that are at once grotesque and strangely beautiful.

The book’s physicality is an integral part of the work: spiral-bound and housed in a custom slipcase, each of the 250 hand-numbered and signed copies becomes a unique object. Designed in collaboration with the celebrated design studio Experimental Jetset and printed by Jo Frenken at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Tiergarten is as much about process as it is about content.

Schwartz, who lives and works in Amsterdam, often investigates the photographic image as a form of spatial and material inquiry. With Tiergarten, he continues this trajectory—inviting viewers to reconsider the relationship between subject, reproduction, and the printed page.