Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell: The Wild Within

New York, NY – Leila Heller Gallery is delighted to present The Wild Within, a solo exhibition by Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell, opening on September 10, 2026.

Bringing together large-scale photographic works, immersive moving-images, and hand-cut glass mosaic wall sculptures, the exhibition marks the artists' first solo presentation in New York. Over the past several years, Koopmans and Wexell have travelled across the world documenting abandoned palaces, villas, sites of worship, theatres, and civic buildings. Using photography and photogrammetric reconstruction as a point of departure, these spaces are meticulously reimagined through digital interventions in which foliage, light, and atmosphere gradually reclaim architecture. Suspended between documentation and imagination, the resulting works explore themes of memory, impermanence, preservation, and the evolving relationship between the built and natural worlds.

The exhibition presents the most comprehensive evolution of The Wild Within to date. Alongside large-scale photographic works and immersive screen-based installations, a new series of hand-cut glass mosaic wall sculptures extends the project into architectural materials, returning digitally constructed environments to physical form, speaking to the architecture that they have explored themselves. The project originated from an encounter with Soviet-era flower postcards scattered across the floor of an abandoned post office in Georgia. Their unexpected presence within a decaying interior became the conceptual foundation for The Wild Within, inspiring an ongoing exploration of how colour, flora, and imagination can transform spaces shaped by abandonment and time.

For Koopmans and Wexell, New York carries profound personal significance. It is the city where they first met seventeen years ago, started collaborating, and where Koopmans later completed his MFA at the School of Visual Arts. Returning with their first solo exhibition in New York represents a meaningful milestone in the continuing development of their practice.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Ryan Koopmans (b. 1986) and Alice Wexell (b. 1992) are Sweden-based artists whose collaborative practice explores the evolving relationship between architecture, nature, and time. Working together for the past fifteen years, they create works that merge photography, motion, digital reconstruction, and sculptural form to reimagine built environments as living, transformative, and imaginative spaces. Koopmans is a Dutch-Canadian lens-based artist whose work examines architecture, society, and the natural world through geometry, repetition, and colour. Wexell is a Swedish digital artist whose background in animation, coding, and emerging technologies informs the duo’s distinctive approach to constructed 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. Their work has been exhibited internationally and is held in leading private and institutional collections.

September 10 – October 22, 2026

Press Release