Editions Fawbush and Gering Lopez Gallery are pleased to announce the newest entry in Leo Villareal’s Bulbox series of lightworks, Bulbox 4.0, 2007. This sculpture will be the final work in the Bulbox series. As with it’s previous incarnations, Bulbox 4.0 is another facet of the artist’s oeuvre in a domestic scale; concerned with whatever technologies, materials and programs Villareal happens to be working with on larger installations at the time. For Bulbox 4.0, the two most obvious differences from earlier works in this series are the addition of color to the LEDs and the luxurious gold-plated surface of the box itself. While color has always played a prominent role in Villareal’s work, this is the first example of it being directly integrated into the heart of a Bulbox. The LEDs, exposed to create a more tactile and less diffused surface as the first two Bulboxes did, create an animated and textured surface. Just under that, the gold-plated aluminum plane which they protrude from creates a semi-reflected ‘ground’ which gives the piece a slight shimmering effect. As in recent works, Villareal explores surface in more than one form; also using mirror-finished aluminum and white enameled surfaces to explore ways that light can act as an object both reflected and emitted. Color, as well as white light, exists on numerous levels in these pieces. For Bulbox 4.0., gold, a color that doesn’t actually ‘exist’ in light form,  is mixed into the visual combination as a luminous yet ‘non-luminous’ ingredient, to a warm effect. And as a foil against Bulbox 3.0, which used white LEDs against a brushed aluminum frame, the current work shows the artist experimenting with a variety of effects, as only a work using color as subject can achieve. And as usual with Villareal’s sculpture, waves of light move across the surface with the hypnotic effect of light on water, molecular patterns, and spectral references.

Leo Villareal has an extensive exhibition history, including many gallery exhibitions and public commissions. These include Digital Stories, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea (CGAC), Santiago, Spain; Backdrop, Bloomberg Space, London, England; All Digital, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH; Set and Drift, Govenors Island, NY; Extreme Abstraction, the Albright-Knox Museum of Art (permanent installation), Buffalo, NY; Visual Music 1905-2005, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Greater New York, PS1/MoMA, Long Island City, NY; Fiction.Love-Ultra New Vision in Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, China; Editions Fawbush: A Selection, Sandra Gering Gallery, NY; Winter Light, Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY; In The Gloaming, The Fields Sculpture Park, Ghent, NY; Sculpture Now, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Palm Beach, FL; and Light x 8, The Jewish Museum, New York, NY. Public works can be viewed at the Arario Museum, Seoul, Korea; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the IFEMA Museum, Madrid, Spain; the Blanton Museum, Austin, TX; the Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; and the Time Warner Center, New York, NY. Leo Villareal is represented in New York by Gering Lopez Gallery.

Double Hexad, 2002


Sunburst, 2002


Bulbox 3.0, 2004


The Devil's Playground (White), 2005