Leo Villareal

Leo Villareal creates immersive and site-specific light installations. While his chosen material—the LED lightbulb—is, formally, in the lineage of Modernist sculptors like Dan Flavin, James Turrell, and Jenny Holzer, who used fluorescent bulbs as sculptural elements, Villareal’s artistic methodology is more attuned to the instructional and systems-based approach of Sol LeWitt’s conceptual wall drawings. Using custom-designed software, Villareal enlivens his light sculptures with pattern and chance, creating large-scale, immersive environments that are continually changing, and that the viewer experiences by moving through them. In their embrace of cutting-edge technology, fluidity of experience, and augmented environments, Villareal’s works question standard notions of viewership and the experience of the artwork.

Villareal was born in 1967 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He received his BA in sculpture from Yale University, in 1990, and a graduate degree in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Villareal was the subject of a survey exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, which traveled throughout the United States. His work is in many permanent collections including Buffalo, New York’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Kagawa, Japan’s Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Overland Park, Kansas’s Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and Washington’s National Gallery of Art. He lives and works in New York.