Some structures outlive the purpose for which they were built. Neither functioning nor fully ruined, they exist in a state of suspension, shaped as much by absence as by design. It is this territory that Dutch-Canadian artist Ryan Koopmans and Swedish artist Alice Wexell have spent years exploring through The Wild Within, an ongoing body of work that reimagines architectural spaces and interiors as environments shaped by memory, ecology, and time.
Rather than documenting these spaces, they transform them. Through photography, photogrammetry, and digital reconstruction, the duo creates environments that remain faithful to the material character of their subjects while extending them into something speculative.
Each project begins long before a camera is raised. The artists research locations for their history, condition, and architectural character before photographing them extensively, often resulting in hundreds to thousands of images. From this material, they construct detailed digital models using photogrammetry, capturing not only surface detail but also the underlying geometry of space itself.
Koopmans typically leads the photographic capture, establishing the architectural foundation of each work. Wexell develops these environments further in the studio, refining structure, light, and atmosphere. The process is not rigidly divided; however, both artists work across the full workflow, shaping not only the architectural form but also the vegetation introduced into it. Growth is not added as ornament but constructed with the same care given to the architecture around it.
The process yields works such as Resilience, in which buildings read not as destroyed but as being renegotiated. Koopmans and Wexell leave structures largely intact in their damaged state — peeling paint, fractured walls, decades of damage undisguised — while constructing vegetation that threads through openings and fissures, extending processes already underway rather than interrupting them.
What emerges across the series is a sense of architecture in transition rather than stasis. These are not sites preserved as nostalgia or framed as ruin, but environments held in the interval between function and disappearance, where material decay and digital reconstruction briefly overlap.
The Wild Within finds precedents in the tradition of capriccio painting, in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century artists combined architectural fragments, ruins, and imagined landscapes into composed scenes where fact and fiction coexisted. The comparison is instructive, though limited. Where capriccio painters assembled invented architectures from disparate sources, Koopmans and Wexell begin with precise spatial data drawn from real locations. Their interventions emerge later, grounded in what was physically present. The speculative dimension arises not from invention alone, but from the extension of existing conditions.
The project now spans multiple geographies and architectural typologies, from the Soviet-era sanatoria of Tskaltubo to shrines of India and abandoned villas in Italy. Across these contexts, what connects them is a shared condition: what architecture becomes once it outlives its original purpose. Many of the spaces the artists have worked with have since been altered, redeveloped, or lost entirely.
Works from the series have been shown at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, the Venice Biennale’s Decentral Art Pavilion, and Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai, which presented a solo exhibition of twenty-four works in November 2025. Among them, The Thought of You achieved the highest price at Christie’s Next Wave Miami during Art Basel week, while Ascend became the first Bitcoin Ordinals-inscribed artwork to sell at a live Christie’s auction in 2024. A new chapter of The Wild Within is set to follow in September 2026.
In conversation with The Exclusivist, the artists discuss site selection, the sculpting of digital ecosystems, the limits of photogrammetry, and what it means to preserve places that no longer exist.
In Conversation with Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell | The Wild Within
Choosing a Building
You research sites extensively before visiting, but the real decision happens on the ground. When you finally enter a building, what tells you it can sustain a second life — that it has the structure and atmosphere to be scanned, rebuilt, and reanimated without losing its integrity?
We are drawn to buildings that are not only visually distinctive, but that also carry a complex socio-cultural, and often politically charged, history. We look for traces of human presence, though never the human figure itself. Instead, we are interested in the evidence people leave behind: marks on the walls where pipes or floorboards have been removed, layers of peeling wallpaper, or even the imprint of a muddy ball repeatedly kicked against a wall by children.
These details reveal how a building has been used, abandoned, altered, and remembered. Atmosphere is essential, but the final decision often comes down to how the space translates through the camera. The human eye and the lens interpret the same subject very differently. A building may feel powerful in person, but it also needs to hold that presence photographically, as the photographic image becomes the foundation for everything that follows.
Digital Ecology
Vegetation and atmosphere are central to your reconstructions. As you build these ecosystems, what proves most demanding — shaping the environment itself, or giving it a sense of life and time?
The process involves two distinct approaches: the physical research, travel, and exploration of the architecture, followed by the studio-based work of meticulously sculpting the flowers, plants, and atmospheric details.
Foliage is not treated as an ornamental layer, but as a force acting upon the architecture over time. It has to appear structurally and atmospherically integrated into the space, which means considering growth patterns, light sources, scale, movement, and the specific conditions of each environment.
The challenge is to create a world that feels composed and intentional, while still retaining a sense of natural evolution. It must feel realistic yet fantastical, heightened but not artificial. Finding the balance between the real and the imagined is the fine thread we are constantly trying to follow.
The Limits of Photogrammetry
When photogrammetry leaves something unresolved, what guides the way you complete what isn’t there — whether that’s cues from the remaining architecture, the atmosphere you experienced on site, or the internal logic of the world you’re building?
Photogrammetry gives us a factual foundation, but not a complete representation of the space. There are often gaps, distortions, and unresolved areas. When that happens, we work from a combination of architectural evidence, spatial memory, and the internal logic of the reconstructed environment.
We are not trying to produce a forensic restoration. The aim is to create an image that remains faithful to the experience and atmosphere of the site, while allowing the work to enter a more imaginative realm.
In that sense, we draw inspiration from the capriccio painters of the 17th and 18th centuries, who would study archaeological sites and architectural ruins in person, then reinterpret those observations in the studio as idealised or speculative landscapes. The final work becomes a synthesis of documentation and invention, of what was physically encountered and what is creatively reconstructed.
We are interested in that space between the real and the imagined, where the building remains rooted in reality but is allowed to move beyond its original condition.
Afterlives
In several cases, your digital reconstructions have outlived the real buildings themselves. When the physical site disappears, does the digital reconstruction take on a different weight for you — almost as though the artwork becomes the last remaining form of the architecture?
When the physical building no longer exists, the visual material inevitably assumes a different significance. The artwork begins to function in several ways: as architectural memory and as a record of our own experience encountering that place at a particular moment in time.
We do not see the work as a substitute for the original site, but it can become one of the remaining ways through which that space continues to be encountered. In some cases, the civilisations or political systems that produced these buildings no longer exist themselves, such as the former Soviet Union. The architecture therefore carries not only the history of a specific place, but also the residue of a broader social and ideological moment.
By recontextualising these spaces as artworks, we are preserving a particular point in their lives: after abandonment, but before complete disappearance. The work allows the architecture to continue in another form, no longer as a functional site, but as an image, an atmosphere, and a vessel of memory.
Cultural Appetite
Your work has been acquired by major collectors, exhibited at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and shown in contexts ranging from Leila Heller Gallery to the Venice Biennale’s Decentral Art Pavilion. Do you feel this cross-sector appetite reflects a broader shift in how collectors and institutions are approaching hybrid digital–physical practices?
I think forward-thinking collectors and institutions are increasingly open to ultra-contemporary mediums. Throughout art history, new movements have often reflected the conditions, technologies, and anxieties of their time, while also facing early resistance for challenging the status quo. It’s therefore natural that new mediums are initially treated as distinct categories.
For us, however, photography, digital reconstruction, animation, and physical installation, for example, are not separate disciplines so much as interconnected tools for telling stories and engaging with the world. What matters is not the novelty of the medium itself, but the depth of the idea and the integrity of the process behind it.
That distinction is important in our work. Although we utilise digital techniques, the practice is grounded in real places and physical experience: researching, travelling, entering the architecture, capturing it through the lens, and then digitally reconstructing and sculpting each environment by hand. We are not using automated systems to generate the work. The process involves a great deal of physical and studio labour, and we believe that commitment of time, attention, and touch reveals itself in the final artworks, even if in subtle ways.
A Hybrid Form
Your practice sits at an unusual intersection: architecture, photogrammetry, digital reconstruction, and animated ecosystems. As this language develops, which direction do you see it moving towards?
We have always embraced new technologies, in part because photography, which remains an important part of our process, is itself a technical medium that has changed dramatically since its inception. We see new tools and techniques not as ends in themselves, but as ways to expand the language of the work and tell the story.
Over time, the direction of the practice follows our evolving interests, whether in a particular technique, material process, or part of the world. As the world changes, and as our relationship to different architectural environments changes with it, The Wild Within will continue to evolve.
We are increasingly working with time-based media, where the artwork is dynamic and can shift according to external conditions such as the time of day or the seasons. This idea of a “living” artwork is particularly suited to digital techniques, allowing the image to coexist with its owner.
At the same time, we are also moving further into physical installation, particularly through hand-cut mosaic wall sculptures made with architectural materials. These works refer back to the built environments that inspire the project, while also echoing the digital pixel itself. In that sense, the work continues to move between the physical and the digital, the architectural and the image-based, the historical and the contemporary.
Official Website: The Wild Within
Artist Websites: Ryan Koopmans | Alice Wexell | Instagram: Alice Wexell | Ryan Koopmans
Representation: Leila Heller Gallery
