The Wild Within
at
Leila Heller Gallery
November 11, 2025 - January 15, 2026
Dubai, UAE – Leila Heller Gallery is delighted to announce The Wild Within, a solo exhibition featuring a curated selection of artworks by Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell, opening on 11 November 2025.
The Wild Within is a captivating series of lens-based artworks by Dutch-Canadian artist Ryan Koopmans and Swedish artist Alice Wexell, exploring the delicate interplay between architecture and the natural world.
Through themes of rebirth, transformation, and renewal, the artists reimagine historic and often abandoned spaces as living environments where nature quietly reclaims the built world.
Blending photography with advanced three-dimensional digital sculpting, Koopmans and Wexell breathe new life into architectural structures—lush foliage winds through forgotten halls, and light glides across timeworn surfaces—creating meditations on memory and impermanence.
Drawing inspiration from the Capriccio tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries, the artists merge documentary precision with digital innovation, crafting imagined worlds suspended between history and rebirth.
Spanning locations from Azerbaijani sanatoriums and Turkish temples to Lebanese villas and Emirati palaces, each work preserves fragments of cultural memory while envisioning nature’s enduring resilience. Many of the depicted structures have since deteriorated or disappeared, making the series both a poetic act of preservation and reconstruction.
Presented as both still images and seamlessly looping video installations, The Wild Within offers immersive, time-suspended experiences where architecture and wilderness coexist in fragile harmony.
The artworks feature custom musical scores written by Swedish composer Karl David Larsson.
Exhibited internationally and represented in major institutional and private collections, the series stands as a testament to the artists’ conceptual depth and technical mastery—honoring the past while reimagining a shared and integrated future between nature and the built environment.
Infinite Bloom
Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2025
Marble pillars with gilded palms at the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque form part of the colonnades encircling the vast courtyard. The floral columns reference the date palm, an enduring symbol of hospitality and life in the UAE. The diversity of global flora reflects the mosque’s message of cultural inclusivity, paradise, and divine beauty.
Constellations
Istanbul, Turkey, 2025
Set within the abandoned Yusuf İzzettin Efendi Mansion, once home to an Ottoman heir, this work transforms fading ornamentation and woodwork into a dreamlike bloom of colour and form. The mansion’s elegance endures through imagined natural rebirth.
Beneath the Painted Sky
Shaki, Azerbaijan, 2025
Inspired by the Palace of Shaki Khans, this work reflects the harmony of shebeke glass, frescoes, and geometry. Nature blooms through pattern and colour, bridging art and devotion.
Between Worlds
Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2025
Inside the luminous Al-Noor Foyer of Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, climbing vines and sculpted flora merge with intricate design. The result is a tranquil vision where nature and ornamentation coexist, inviting contemplation and calm.
The Near and the Vast
Dubai, UAE, 2025
Inspired by Dubai’s Imam Hussein Mosque, often referred to as the Iranian Mosque and built in the 1970s, this piece transforms its iconic Persian-style façade into a surreal sanctuary. Vivid floral arabesques and calligraphic patterns bloom into three dimensions, merging architectural craftsmanship with imagined organic growth.
Taif Roses & Diamonds
Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 2025
A historic building in Jeddah’s Al Balad district, known for its painted rawasheen shutters, is reimagined in bloom. Vibrant flora weaves through Hijazi architecture, merging memory, craftsmanship, and natural vitality.
Into the Light
Gelebeç, Turkey, 2025
Inside the abandoned Church of St. Nicholas, a tree rises within the crumbling nave.
Flora intertwines with sacred architecture, tracing cycles of transformation and renewal.
Adore You
Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2025
In the Al-Salaam Foyer of Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, marble and floral motifs are transformed into a living sanctuary. Blossoms echo the mosque’s patterns, balancing the permanence of stone with nature’s vitality.
Dreams of You
Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 2025
The historic Batarji House, once the American Embassy, becomes a threshold between worlds. Beyond its ornate doorway, desert and flora converge, blending memory and imagination.
Around Us
Denizli, Turkey, 2025
Inspired by the early twentieth-century Akköy Yukarı Mosque, this work reimagines a space once defined by vivid botanical murals and ornate Ottoman brushwork. The artists revive its spiritual calm, merging history, geometry, and organic growth in a renewed moment of stillness.
Mirage
Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2025
In the Al-Noor Foyer of Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, white marble and surreal blooms form a luminous wall. The work captures stillness and shelter within desert light.
Heartbeats
Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2025
Within the grand hall of Qasr Al Watan, digital flora softens marble pillars and gilded geometry.
The work imagines a meeting between architectural splendour and the gentle persistence of natural life.
The Wish
Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2025
The upper floors of Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental are transformed into a lush refuge of gold and greenery. Nature and opulence coexist, offering a vision of peace within grandeur.
Resilience
Aley, Lebanon, 2025
The Grand Aley Hotel, built in 1926, witnessed decades of change before falling silent during the Civil War. Now its weathered walls and peeling paint host gentle overgrowth, symbolizing Lebanon’s enduring spirit and the quiet persistence of memory.
A New Era
Sharjah, UAE, 2025
Set within the shifting sands of Sharjah’s desert, A New Era reimagines a once-inhabited settlement where traditional Emirati architecture meets the quiet vastness of the dunes. Koopmans and Wexell were drawn to the site by its serene atmosphere, the clarity and gentle geometry of its structures, and the striking palette, soft blue interior hues contrasted by the golden light of the surrounding landscape.
Passages
Dubai, UAE, 2025
Dubai’s Jumeirah Mosque, blending Fatimid and Mamluk styles, is reinterpreted as a gateway of light and growth. Palm leaves and desert flora animate its sandstone façade, symbolizing continuity and renewal.
Beyond Time
Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2025
Within the ornate halls of Qasr Al Watan, the UAE’s Presidential Palace, gilded arches and marble inlays are re-envisioned as a living garden. Blossoms, including the national flower Tribulus omanense, intertwine with architectural detail, merging heritage and renewal.
Blossom of the Ancestors
Dubai, UAE, 2025
Set within the historic Al Maktoum Residence in Dubai’s Al Shindagha district, overlooking Dubai Creek, this work reimagines its arched colonnade and coral-stone walls. Lush flowers spill across the courtyard, merging the city’s maritime heritage with nature’s quiet renewal.
Under the Rain of Light
Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2025
Set beneath the celestial canopy of the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s iconic dome, Under the Rain of Light envisions a solitary oak tree rooted at the heart of the museum’s Great Hall: a symbolic intersection of history, architecture, and nature.
The artwork draws inspiration from the museum’s architectural poetics, echoing the radial geometry and filtered luminosity that define the space. The oak tree, long a symbol of strength, wisdom, and continuity across cultures, becomes here a vessel for temporal dialogue.
Digitally sculpted and seamlessly integrated into the Louvre’s central atrium, the tree grows not from soil but from cultural sediment, centuries of art, migration, and memory converging in this iconic institution. Its branches reflect and refract the same light that filters through Giuseppe Penone’s Leaves of Light, placing this new work in quiet conversation with Penone’s bronze tree, another expression of time, nature, and human perception.
Suspended in an infinite loop, the foliage sways gently, as if caught between motion and memory. Within the museum’s architectural calm, a subtle pulse of organic life animates the stillness.
Under the Rain of Light continues The Wild Within’s exploration of abandoned and historic spaces. But here, the artists expand their vision into a masterpiece of institutional architecture, reimagining a living symbol of rebirth within a sanctuary dedicated to cultural preservation.
The result is a layered meditation on permanence and impermanence, the artificial and the organic, the physical and the digital, and the enduring human instinct to find sanctuary in the union of art and nature.
Heart of Sharjah
Sharjah, UAE, 2025
Set within Al Bait Al Gharbi (“The Western House”) in Sharjah’s Al Mareijah district, this work reimagines a historic residence of Sheikh Sultan bin Saqr bin Khalid Al Qasimi. Once a vibrant hub for merchants, poets, and pearl divers, the scene becomes a poetic fusion of Emirati architecture and imagined natural growth, evoking the Gulf’s rich history of trade and cultural exchange.
Memories of the Future
Baku, Azerbaijan, 2025
Reimagining the abandoned “Fantasy Hamam,” a lavish bathhouse once adorned with painted ceilings, Romanesque columns, and ornate detailing, as a surreal sanctuary.
Heights
Beirut, Lebanon, 2022
Inside a decaying villa in Beirut’s Dannawi neighbourhood, sunlight filters through a collapsed roof onto faded mouldings and painted ceilings. Nature reclaims the structure with soft blooms and ferns, transforming its forgotten grandeur into a serene garden and evoking the quiet endurance of Lebanon’s architectural heritage.
Meet Me Here
Dubai, UAE, 2025
The Iranian Mosque Hosainia (also known as the Ali Ibn Abi Talib Mosque) is a Twelver Shia mosque built in 1979 in the Bur Dubai district near the historic Textile Souk. Established by the city’s Iranian community, it is renowned for its Persian-inspired architecture.
Tides of Time
Mumbai, India, 2025
Along the rocky shore of Worli in Mumbai, a pale blue shrine rises at the edge of the Arabian Sea. Built in 1908 by a mariner shaped by those same waters, it stands where the land yields to the tide, its dome and arches breathing with the sea’s slow rhythm.
Within it, soft blue flowers unfold like echoes of the ocean, symbols of maternal grace and quiet renewal, their forms drifting between solidity and surrender.
Framed by the shifting skyline of Mumbai, the shrine becomes a threshold between nature and architecture, the real and the imagined; a moment of stillness held within an ever-changing city.
About the Artist
Ryan Koopmans (b. 1986) & Alice Wexell (b. 1992) are Stockholm-based artists whose collaborative practice explores the evolving dialogue between architecture, nature, and time.
Working together for the past 15 years and having lived in cities such as New York, London, and Amsterdam, they create captivating artworks that merge photography, motion, and digital sculpture to reimagine the world’s built environments as living, transformative, and imaginative spaces.
Koopmans, a Dutch-Canadian lens-based artist (BA, MFA), examines the intersection of architecture, society, and the natural world through a lens of geometry, repetition, and color. His work, rooted in studies of geography, art history, and psychology, has been exhibited internationally since 2007 and is represented in major private and institutional collections. His book Vantage (Black Dog Press, 2019) explores surreal architectural forms and post-urban landscapes, reflecting his long-standing fascination with the poetry of form.
Wexell, a Swedish digital artist, brings a multidisciplinary approach grounded in animation, coding, and emerging technologies. Educated at Lund and Uppsala Universities and twice a graduate of Hyper Island, her practice fuses technical innovation with poetic storytelling, creating environments that blur the boundary between the real and the imagined.
Together, they are best known for The Wild Within, an acclaimed body of work that digitally revives historically significant and often abandoned interiors through the introduction of vegetation, light, and motion. The series symbolically explores cycles of decay and renewal, envisioning a future in which nature and architecture exist in harmonious balance.
Artworks from The Wild Within have been widely exhibited and acquired by leading collectors, galleries, and institutions worldwide, including recent presentations
