Ryan Koopmans (Canadian-Dutch, b. 1986) is a lens-based artist whose work explores the built environment and its relationship with nature and the societies shaped by it.,Since 2021 he has collaborated with the Swedish 3D artist and photographer Alice Wexell on The Wild Within, a project that digitally revives abandoned buildings.,
Koopmans was born in Amsterdam and raised on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia in 2008 and a Master of Fine Arts in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2012.He worked as a professional fine art and documentary photographer beginning in 2006, photographing surreal architectural forms and megacities with an emphasis on geometry, repetition and colour, work gathered in his 2019 book Vantage, published by Black Dog Press.,In 2016, PDN included him in its list of 30 photographers to watch.
With Wexell, Koopmans travels to abandoned buildings around the world, photographing them before digitally sculpting vegetation and motion into the images for The Wild Within, staging a surreal collision between past and future, natural and manmade.The project's first release, focused on a Soviet-era sanatorium in Tskaltubo, Georgia, debuted on 24 March 2021.,Sanctuary, developed with wild.xyz and scored by Karl-David Larson, lets viewers walk through a photogrammetry-scanned reinterpretation of an abandoned Georgian health spa.The Enchanted Hour, based on a 400-year-old abandoned villa in northern Italy, functions as a living clock in which an owl emerges every hour to mark the time, and sits in the permanent collection of the FC Francisco Carolinum Museum in Linz, Austria.
In December 2023, The Thought of You, depicting an abandoned Baroque villa in Lazio, Italy, was exhibited in Miami during Art Basel before drawing a top bid of $44,013 in Christie's online Miami Edit auction.,The following October, Ascend became the first artwork inscribed on Bitcoin to be auctioned live at Christie's, selling in London for $57,400 as the only digital artwork in the house's Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale.,Koopmans and Wexell also presented work during a week-long takeover of Outernet's public screens in London for Digital Art Week 2025.
