Leo Villareal

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.

Golden Game coincides with multiple major projects by the artist this year. In January, Villareal unveiled a new site- specific installation Star Ceiling (El Paso) at the El Paso Museum of Art in Texas. His expansive new monograph, Leo Villareal: Coding Light, from Phaidon is set to release this fall on November 12. And from 2026, The Bay Lights, a new iteration of his celebrated public artwork spanning 1.8 miles of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, will be illuminated for another ten years.

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. His public installation at Tokyo’s Toranomon Hills Station Tower, Firmament (Mori), was commissioned by Mori Building Co. and features sequenced patterns of light inspired by the movement of people, traffic, and weather in the area.

Villareal’s work can be found in major institutions around the world, including the Benesse Art Site in Naoshima, Japan; the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul; the Long Museum in Shanghai; the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York; the National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; and MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, among many others.

Golden Game will run concurrently with a presentation of work by the French modernist Sonia Delaunay at Pace Tokyo, drawing connections between both artists’ use of abstraction to explore perception, pattern, rhythm, and illusionistic optical effects.