
Golden Game––Leo Villareal’s debut solo show in Japan––will be an exhibition featuring the Mexican American artist’s latest body of work. The exhibition follows the unveiling of Villareal’s first public artwork in Japan, Firmament (Mori) (2023), a luminous, cosmic artwork gracing the entrance to the Toranomon Hills Station Tower in Tokyo. Villareal’s presentation at Pace Tokyo will showcase his exploration of the relationships among nature, technology, chance, and the human experience, and it will invite viewers to consider the boundary between the physical and digital worlds.
Rooted in the art historical language of abstraction, Villareal’s practice uses pixels and binary code to create complex, rhythmic compositions. Investigating the capacity of light and code as both medium and subject, Villareal’s work is concerned with the immersive, experiential, and sensorial qualities of perception. He has realized numerous large-scale public projects internationally, including Illuminated River, a vibrant, long-term installation on view across nine bridges along the Thames in London and Hive (Bleeker Street), a light sculpture in the shape of a honeycomb at the transfer point between the Bleecker Street and Broadway-Lafayette Street subway stations in New York.








Leo Villareal (b. 1967, Albuquerque, New Mexico) works with LED lights to create complex, rhythmic artworks for both gallery and public settings. He focuses on identifying the governing structures of systems, and is interested in base units such as pixels and binary code. His installations use custom, artist-created code, which constantly changes the frequency, intensity, and patterning of lights through sequencing. Villareal has created temporary and permanent lightworks and sculptures for public spaces and museums including the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C; and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Villareal’s winning submission for the 2016 Illuminated River International Design Competition, will use light and colour in an integrated composition to enliven the bridges of the River Thames in London.




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