Johannes Schwartz

Johannes Schwartz (1970, Munich, Germany) lives and works in Amsterdam. His photographs approach their subjects indirectly, focusing on the residues, accumulations, and overlooked objects that surround human activity rather than the activity itself. More than anything, his work shows that the most marginal subject is in fact the most meaningful; Schwartz focuses on such details like a therapist on a Freudian slip, the more one tries to emphasise their pointlessness, the harsher they are illuminated.

Schwartz employs his camera with an industrial rigor, and despite his fluent Dutch, seems to favor an elementary language all of his own. He has worked in series throughout his career, often in close collaboration with graphic designers Experimental Jetset, with whom he has produced the ongoing HIGH SERIES since 2003: publications around exhibitions that simultaneously form part of them.

His project High Value, part of the Dutch submission at the 2011 Venice Biennale, revolves around objects gifted to the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science over the decades: trophies of alliance and gratitude that ended up in governmental corridors, overlooked and unquestioned. Working as a sort of uninvited archival photographer, Schwartz added a layer of paper, a "white shadow" that gives each object a cartoon-like animatedness. His book Tiergarten (Roma Publications, 2014), acquired by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, photographs the food prepared for animals at the Moscow Zoo, printed using a risograph to produce saturated, deliberately anachronistic color.

Schwartz studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam (1995–1998), where he later served as Head of the Photography Department (2004–2011).

Solo exhibitions include Walls, Leporello, Rome (2023); Blue, turning grey over you, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2021); Cuckoo, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2020); Tiergarten, San Serriffe, Amsterdam (2019); Passion, Cobra Museum, Amstelveen (2010); and Shadow Stabbing, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2004).

Group exhibitions include Because, De Vishal, Haarlem (2023); Temporary House of Home, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam (2021); Reading Room, Pratt Photography Gallery, New York (2019); Open: A Bakema Celebration, Nederlands Paviljoen, Biennale di Venezia (2012); and Opera Aperta / Loose Work, Nederlands Paviljoen, Biennale di Venezia (2011).

Awards include the Cobra Kunstprijs, Amstelveen (2007); a commission from the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst via the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (2004); and the Esther Kroon Award (1998). His work is held in the collections of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Fotomuseum Den Haag, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, Museum Voorlinden, ABN AMRO, Akzo Nobel, and FRAC Bretagne, among others.