The Wild Within
at
Leila Heller Gallery
November 11, 2025 - January 15, 2026
Leila Heller Gallery is pleased to present The Wild Within, a series of lens-based artworks by Dutch-Canadian artist Ryan Koopmans and Swedish artist Alice Wexell that explore the poetic harmony between nature and architecture.
Through themes of rebirth, transformation, and renewal, the artists reimagine historic and vacant structures as living environments where plants, flowers, and trees gently integrate with the built world.
Blending photography with advanced 3D digital sculpting, Koopmans & Wexell breathe new life into architectural sites as light glides across moss-covered surfaces and vibrant foliage flourishes through decay, creating meditations on memory, impermanence, and regeneration.
Inspired by the Capriccio tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries, they merge documentary realism with digital invention, crafting imagined worlds where architecture and wilderness coexist.
Spanning sites from Azerbaijani sanatoriums to Turkish temples and Lebanese villas, each work preserves fragments of cultural memory while envisioning nature’s quiet resilience. Many of the depicted sites have since deteriorated or vanished, rendering the series both a poetic act of preservation and renewal.
Presented as still images and seamlessly looping video installations, The Wild Within invites viewers into time-suspended spaces where vines, blossoms, and stone intertwine, reminding us of nature’s enduring dialogue with architecture and the beauty of their shared reclamation.
In January 2026, Koopmans & Wexell will travel to Doha to explore Qatar’s rich architectural heritage, continuing their artistic journey of capturing historic sites and harmoniously entwining them with nature through their imaginative visual practice.
A Curated Selection of Works
from
The Wild Within
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
About the Artists
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
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Installation Images
