Leo Villareal
Leo Villareal is an American artist living and working in New York City. His work combines LED lights and encoded computer programming to create illuminated displays. He is represented by Pace Gallery.
Biography
Leo Villareal graduated from Portsmouth Abbey School in 1986. He received a BA in sculpture from Yale University in 1990 and a graduate degree from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Interactive Telecommunications Program.The decisive moment that started his career came in Nevada’s Black Rock desert, during the 1997 Burning Man festival when Villareal rigged up a strobe-light array above his tent so that he could find it more easily.
Villareal has permanent installations at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Renwick Gallery and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, as well as in the private collections of contemporary art collectors CJ Follini. His work has also been on display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Madison Square Park in New York City, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the PS 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York, The Northpark Mall in Dallas, and Brooklyn Academy of Music.
On March 5, 2013, Villareal debuted his largest piece to that date, The Bay Lights," a public light installation consisting of 25,000 LEDs strung on the vertical cables of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The installation cost $8 million to install and was activated nightly through 2015. It was replaced in 2016 with a permanent version.
July 17th 2019, the first stage of his Illuminated River project went live, the project is running in three phases, and first bridges to be added were London Bridge, Southwark Bridge, Millennium Bridge, and Cannon Street Bridge. Phase Two, will add Blackfriars Road Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, Westminster Bridge, Lambeth Bridge, and the Golden Jubilee Footbridges, is planned for autumn 2020 and the entire project by 2022.
His piece 'Optical Machine I' was featured in The Miami Beach Edition during Art Basel Miami Beach. His piece 'Liminal Gradient for ' was displayed at the auction co-founded by Bono. It was described by architect Sir David Adjaye as "an L.E.D. Rothko".
Leo Villareal is represented by Gering and Lopez Gallery in New York and by Conner Contemporary Art in Washington, DC.
Installations
| Project | Location | Year | homepage | notes |
| Multiverse | National Gallery of Art | 2008 | ||
| Sky | Tampa Museum of Art | 2010 | LED-studded aluminium veil for the Museum | |
| The Bay Lights | San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge | 2013 | western section of the 7.1km Bay Bridge linking San Francisco to Oakland | |
| Light Matrix | New Zealand | 2016 | illuminated three-storey facade of the Auckland Theatre Company | |
| Illuminated River | London | 2019 | creative lighting to eventually cover 15 of the bridges of the River Thames in London |