Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Leo Villareal at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York.
On view from March 17 to April 29, the show will feature 15 new sculptures in which Villareal employs LEDs and custom software to investigate space, time, and perception. Titled Interstellar, this exhibition will mark the artist's first presentation in New York since 2017 and his seventh show with the gallery since joining its program.
Villareal's practice is part of a lineage of artistic engagement that explores the connections between nature, technology, and human experience. The artist's upcoming exhibition with Pace in New York will feature wall-based sculptures, including works from his new Nebulae series. Emitting hypnotic, diffused light, the Nebulae sculptures are informed by celestial imagery and evoke the dynamism of space through interplays of colour and shape. Villareal creates unique and specific sequencing for each artwork through code that is generative and visceral, like nature itself. As such, no two sculptures are the same.
This presentation at Pace in New York will also include works realised at a scale that Villareal hasn't explored in nearly a decade: two-foot square wall-mounted sculptures. These intimately scaled artworks, paired with their glass enclosures, encourage focused readings of Villareal's abstractions. Like his larger works, the two-foot pieces invite viewers to consider the boundary separating physical and digital worlds.
Villareal harnesses the power of light, size, and site specificity for large-scale public projects, including The Bay Lights, a public art installation spanning 1.8 miles of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, and Illuminated River, a vibrant, long- term installation on view across nine bridges along the Thames in London. His most recent large-scale public artwork, Fountain (KCI), was completed in February 2023 and celebrates Kansas City's legacy as The City of Fountains.
In addition to his museum, gallery, and public art projects, Villareal debuted his first NFT series, titled Cosmic Reef, on the leading generative art platform Art Blocks in January 2022. Created using a combination of human control and computational chance, the works in this series feature mesmeric, evolving geometries. Continuing his explorations in web3, Villareal released Cosmic Bloom in December 2022 with Outland, a platform focused on the meeting of digital technologies and contemporary art. Cosmic Bloom is a continuation of the artist's Cosmologies series, which began with Cosmic Reef and draws inspiration from organic and biological structures, stellar phenomena, and atomic patterns.
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.
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.
