Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell: The Wild Within

The Wild Within is Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell's first solo exhibition in New York and the largest presentation of the series to date.

Bringing together large-scale photographs, immersive moving image works, and a new body of hand-cut glass mosaic sculptures, the exhibition traces the evolution of a project that began with an unexpected discovery: a scattering of Soviet-era flower postcards across the floor of an abandoned post office in Georgia. That fleeting encounter sparked an ongoing exploration of how color, vegetation, and imagination can transform spaces marked by neglect, history, and the passage of time.

Working from photographs of abandoned palaces, theatres, places of worship, and civic buildings around the world, Koopmans and Wexell digitally reconstruct these interiors before allowing foliage, light, and atmosphere to slowly reclaim them. The new mosaic works bring these imagined spaces back into physical form, extending the project beyond the screen. The exhibition also marks a return to the city where the artists first met and began collaborating, making this New York presentation both a milestone in their practice and the fullest expression of The Wild Within so far.

Ryan Koopmans (b. 1986) and Alice Wexell (b. 1992) are Stockholm-based artists whose collaborative practice explores the relationship between architecture, nature, and time. For the past 15 years, drawing on experiences living in New York, London, and Amsterdam, they have created works that combine photography, motion, and digital sculpture to transform real architectural spaces into immersive, imagined environments.

Koopmans, a Dutch-Canadian artist, examines the intersection of architecture, society, and the natural world through geometry, repetition, and color. His work has been exhibited internationally since 2007 and is held in major private and institutional collections. Wexell, a Swedish digital artist, brings expertise in animation, coding, and emerging technologies, blending technical innovation with poetic storytelling. Works by the artists have been widely exhibited and collected, including presentations at Christie’s London, Sotheby’s France, and the Francisco Carolinum Museum in Linz, Austria.