Art Exhibition Of The Wild Within By Ryan Koopmans And Alice Wexell

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.