The Wild Within
New York Exhibition
September 10 - October 22, 2026
The Wild Within is a series of lens-based artworks by Dutch-Canadian artist Ryan Koopmans and Swedish artist Alice Wexell exploring the evolving relationship between nature and architecture. Through themes of rebirth, transformation, and renewal, the artists reimagine historic, distinctive, and often abandoned spaces as places where nature gently reclaims the built environment.
Blending photography, three-dimensional digital sculpting, and subtle motion, Koopmans and Wexell introduce imagined vegetation into architectural sites. Overgrowth winds through ornate halls and light drifts across aging surfaces, creating scenes that feel both tangible and imagined. The project exists as still images, seamlessly looping videos, and hand-cut glass mosaic wall sculptures that bring the architectural physicality of the subject matter back into material form while referencing the digital pixel through individual glass tiles.
Each artwork takes many months to create and requires substantial resources, technical precision, and meticulous attention to geometry, symmetry, and the patterns found in nature and architecture. The resulting works are highly sought after by collectors and institutions worldwide.
A recurring motif is the flower, symbolizing life’s fleeting progression from seed to bloom to decay. While flowers embody impermanence in the physical world, within these artworks their transience is preserved and prolonged indefinitely.
The project is informed by the artists’ global travels and their creation of virtual foliage in a Swedish studio shaped by seasonal extremes. Long, dark winters contrast with luminous summers and midsummer rituals of flowers, greenery, and light, inspiring the work’s meditation on cycles of life and renewal.
Entering the spaces they photograph, from the cracked walls of forgotten sanatoria to the intricate carvings of grand palaces, raises questions about the lives once held within them: Who conceived these structures? Who lived there? What conversations filled the rooms, and what memories remain? These questions guide the creative process, transforming each artwork into a site of reflection, history, and memory.
Spanning Azerbaijani spas, Italian palaces, Mexican estates, Lebanese villas, and Soviet-era sanatoria, Koopmans and Wexell document culturally significant sites suspended between history and transformation. On location, they photograph and scan the interiors. Back in the studio, they digitally sculpt foliage, refine the lighting, and introduce subtle movement, reviving stillness through imagined growth and vitality.
Conceptually, the project draws from the 17th- and 18th-century Capriccio tradition, in which artists combined architecture, archaeology, nature, and imagination. Koopmans and Wexell adopt a similar approach, blending documentary precision with invention to explore the tension between structure and wilderness, permanence and impermanence.
In The Wild Within, nature and architecture coexist in a fragile balance, captured at a moment when both can equally shine. The overgrowth softens and revives the architecture while suggesting its eventual reclamation by nature. Some of the depicted buildings have since deteriorated or been demolished, making the artworks both imaginative reconstructions and preservations of memory.
Through still images, looping videos, and hand-cut glass mosaics, The Wild Within creates immersive experiences in which time appears suspended. Each work reflects on the boundary between reality and imagination and the poetic balance between human creation and natural resilience.
Works by Koopmans and Wexell are held in significant private and institutional collections worldwide, including the permanent collections of the Francisco Carolinum Museum in Linz, Austria, and the Swedish Ministry of Culture. Their work has been exhibited at leading cultural institutions and events, including Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan, the 2022 Venice Art Biennale, Milan Design Weeks, Global Art Fairs, the Museum of the Future, and Prague Castle. Additional partnerships and presentations have taken place at Le Bristol Paris, with the Jane Goodall Institute during the Cannes Film Festival, at UNICEF art galas, and through Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
Exhibited Artworks
Ignite
Genoa, Italy, 2026
Formats: Motion video · Archival pigment print
Set within Genoa’s historic coastal district of Albaro, Ignite traces the metamorphosis of a structure shaped by devotion, refinement, war, and resilience.
Once a medieval place of worship, later transformed into a neoclassical villa and eventually repurposed as a healthcare facility, the building carries layered histories within its weathered surfaces, where traces of faith, elegance, and endurance quietly coexist.
Held in Light
Alaniçi (Pigi-Peristerona), Cyprus, 2026
Formats: Motion video · Archival pigment print
Within the village of Alaniçi, historically known as Pigi–Peristerona, Held in Light reimagines the blue interior of an abandoned Greek Orthodox church in Cyprus, a fragile marker of the island’s layered past.
Shaped by histories of faith, displacement, and the geopolitical tensions between Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities, the building now stands under threat, its presence slowly fading within a divided landscape.
Bathed in luminous blue, the space becomes a vessel of memory and continuity, where light gathers across surfaces touched by history, absence, and time.
Constellations
Istanbul, Turkey, 2025
Formats: Motion video · Archival pigment print
Set within the abandoned 19th-century Yusuf İzzettin Efendi Mansion in Istanbul, this work reimagines the Ottoman heir’s former residence as a blooming, dreamlike interior.
Once celebrated for its blue ornamentation, intricate woodwork, and sweeping gardens,
the mansion’s imported Romanian timber now frames a vision where history and nature intertwine.
Spring Sonata
Pontremoli, Italy, 2024
Format: Archival pigment print
Within a historic palazzo in Pontremoli, Spring Sonata reflects the fragile grandeur of an eighteenth-century residence shaped by myth, ornament, and decline.
Its crumbling rooms are marked by frescoes painted by Nicolò Contestabili in 1795, including the Sala della Niobe, where scenes from the myth of Niobe unfold across the damaged surfaces. Through this layered setting, the artwork evokes a suspended dialogue between classical tragedy, architectural memory, and nature’s quiet return.
At Last
Novi Ligure, Italy, 2026
Formats: Motion video · Archival pigment print
Rising from the hills above Novi Ligure, At Last reflects the fading grandeur of a historic residence shaped by wealth, ambition, and abandonment.
Once connected to Count Edilio Raggio, a powerful industrialist, shipowner, and long-serving parliamentarian, the building still carries traces of its former status within its weathered rooms.
Its frescoed ceilings and ornamented interiors remain among the most evocative remnants of the site, where grandeur, memory, and decay quietly converge.
Into the Light
Güllübahçe, Turkey, 2025
Formats: Motion video · Archival pigment print
Set within the abandoned Church of St. Nicholas (Aziz Nikolaos Kilisesi) in Güllübahçe, Turkey, this work reimagines the 1821 structure, built atop the remains of an earlier church and later converted into a mosque.
Digitally sculpted flora and a central tree fill the crumbling nave weaving nature into the building’s layered history of cultural and religious transformation.
Horizon
Yucatan, Mexico, 2026
Formats: Motion video · Archival pigment print
At an abandoned crumbling Hacienda, Horizon reimagines the remains of a once-powerful henequen estate, part of a regional history shaped by agriculture, industry, colonial wealth, and complex systems of labour.
During Yucatán’s henequen boom, estates like this helped produce the fibre known as “green gold,” generating immense prosperity while also carrying the social tensions and inequalities of the era.
Now weathered by time, its arches, chapel, machine house, and crumbling rooms stand as traces of a vanished economic order.
Within this setting, the artwork reflects on the fragile endurance of architecture after power has receded, allowing nature, memory, and light to move through the remains of a place shaped by ambition, labour, and decline.
Resilience
Aley, Lebanon, 2025
Formats: Motion video · Archival pigment print
Built in 1926 in the mountain town of Aley, outside Beirut, the Grand Aley Hotel witnessed decades of change, from glamorous summers to wartime service, before falling silent during the Lebanese Civil War. Its walls, now layered with flaking and peeling paint, bear the marks of time.
Embracing the building’s monochromatic green palette, the work reflects Lebanon’s enduring spirit.
A New Era
Sharjah, UAE, 2025
Formats: Motion video · Archival pigment print
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
Formats: Motion video · Archival pigment print
Within a crumbling villa in Beirut’s Zuqaq Al Blat neighbourhood, built between 1890 and 1920, the artwork reimagines its faded grandeur as a flourishing garden.
Sunlight streams through the partially collapsed roof illuminating a hybrid of Parisian influences and Baghdadi painted ceilings, alongside intricate mouldings, arched columns, and timeworn walls.
Wild blooms and ferns reclaim the space, merging Lebanon’s architectural heritage with the quiet resilience of nature.
Tides of Time
Mumbai, India, 2025
Formats: Motion video · Archival pigment print
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.
Wall Sculptures
Walk With Me
Hand-Cut Glass Mosaic Wall Sculpture
2026
Hand-cut glass tesserae, mounted on dibond panel, framed in oak
Unique work
270 × 152 cm
Inside an abandoned sanatorium in Tskaltubo, Georgia, Walk With Me unfolds within a stairwell that once belonged to one of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated spa destinations.
From the 1940s through the 1990s, Tskaltubo drew thousands of visitors seeking rest, treatment, and the restorative qualities of its mineral waters, before the collapse of the USSR left its grand sanatoriums in decline.
Designed in a Classical style, the building’s stripped corridors and fractured architectural details now reveal the bare structure of a former era.
Fragments from The Wild Within
Hand-Cut Glass Mosaic Wall Sculpture
The mosaics mark a new evolution of The Wild Within, extending the project through glass, tile, and architectural materials.
Their visual language originates in one of the earliest discoveries behind the series:
Soviet-era flower postcards found scattered across the floor of an abandoned post office in Georgia.
Their vivid colours felt strangely alive within the ruined architecture, small remnants of another time already being reclaimed by silence, memory, and decay.
These fragments became a spark for the project’s practice of rewilding: the idea that colour, growth, and imagination might return to spaces marked by abandonment.
Across the series, some mosaics translate the found flower postcards directly into hand-cut glass, while others reinterpret new works from The Wild Within, depicting architectural spaces transformed by imagined growth.
Together, they complete a full circle: from physical architecture, into the digital realm through photography and 3D reconstruction, and back into material form through glass, tile, and architectural surface.
The choice of glass and architectural materials connects the works to the built environments from which they emerged, while each square tessera also echoes the digital pixel, linking the ancient material language of mosaic to the digitally native origins of the artworks.
Each fragment becomes part of a larger whole, suspended between ruin and renewal, past and future, the physical and the digital, the real and the imagined.
The Inspiration
Flower postcards, found scattered across the floor of an abandoned site in Georgia, became an early point of origin for The Wild Within, inspiring the introduction of fantastical foliage into forgotten architectural spaces shaped by abandonment, memory, and nature’s return.
The works draw on the history of Soviet-era mosaics, from decorative wall tiles to glass compositions found throughout many of the same buildings we explored.
Floral postcards, typically photographed in studios against highly saturated backgrounds, circulated alongside images of the republic’s most important buildings.
Both were used to communicate national ideals and values through carefully constructed, ideologically charged imagery.
Their artificial settings and symbolic messaging make them a compelling element within The Wild Within, where the boundaries between reality and fiction, power and decay, and nature and architecture are continually blurred.
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