Art Zoo Museum

Art Zoo Museum is an artistic tribute to the animal kingdom and nature, housed in a 17th-century canal house in Amsterdam. Visitors can view taxidermy art by Darwin, Sinke & Van Tongeren, featuring animals like colorful birds, snakes, crocodiles, and a T. rex.

Planning your visit

Art Zoo occupies a seventeenth-century canal house in Amsterdam and shows taxidermy as contemporary art. The work is by Darwin, Sinke and Van Tongeren, a Dutch studio whose pieces are collected internationally and whose approach differs sharply from natural history mounting: animals are posed as sculpture, arranged in compositions, and treated as objects of beauty and unease rather than scientific specimens.

The collection includes exotic birds arranged by colour, snakes, crocodiles, big cats and a Tyrannosaurus reconstruction. The studio works only with animals that died naturally, in zoos or breeding programmes, which is the ethical position the museum states clearly.

The canal house setting — panelled rooms, painted ceilings, tall windows over the water — makes the effect considerably stranger than a white gallery would.

Reactions divide. Some visitors find the work extraordinary; others find taxidermy as art difficult regardless of sourcing.

Bookable options are entry tickets. Current availability is shown below.