New York – 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 color 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 realized 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, longterm 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) creates complex works of art with LED lights, using custom programming to constantly change their frequency, intensity, and patterning. Ranging from wall-mounted pieces and room-sized installations to public projects the scale of buildings and bridges, Villareal’s light-based works prompt reconsideration of light, space, and technology. Often inspired by natural phenomena, they evoke—but do not illustrate—elemental and atmospheric systems with emergent behavior that occurs without a predetermined outcome. Firmly rooted in abstraction, Villareal’s approach uses layered sequencing to develop his light sculptures, resulting in open-ended, immersive experiences for viewers.
