The Wild Within: Soviet Postcard Flowers, Cut in Glass
Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell's first New York solo show at Leila Heller Gallery debuts Fragments, twelve glass mosaics of the Soviet-era flower postcards that started The Wild Within.
Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell opened The Wild Within at Leila Heller Gallery in New York on September 10. The gallery lists the show through October 22, 2026, and calls it the duo's first solo exhibition in New York and the largest presentation of the series to date. Koopmans is a Dutch-Canadian lens-based artist and Wexell a Swedish digital artist, and the Sweden-based pair have worked together for fifteen years.
The Wild Within starts with real places. The duo photograph abandoned palaces, villas, theatres and civic buildings, then rebuild them in the studio with digitally sculpted vegetation, light and motion. The project began in Tskaltubo, Georgia, among former Soviet sanatoriums, and the gallery traces it to "a scattering of Soviet-era flower postcards across the floor of an abandoned post office in Georgia."
Those postcards are now the subject of Fragments, twelve glass mosaics shown in New York as the first public outing for the duo's mosaic work. Fragment No. 1 through Fragment No. 12 each measure 30 x 40 cm in hand-cut glass tesserae and grout, mounted on Dibond and framed in pine. Koopmans wrote on X that the panels "reinterpret Soviet-era postcard designs," and told Odalisque that the mosaics "take months to make."
The largest mosaic in the show, Walk With Me, is 270 x 152 cm and depicts a stairwell in an abandoned sanatorium in Georgia. Koopmans writes that each tessera "echoes the structure of a digital pixel," tying an ancient craft back to the digital process behind every scene in the series.
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