LONDON.- Outland announced the public display of Leo Villareal's Cosmic Bloom, as part of the Winter Light outdoor exhibition at Southbank Centre, London. Bridging the gap between the art world and established and emerging digital practices, Outland has partnered with the legendary institution to project Cosmic Bloom on the Royal Festival Hall’s historic facade, situating the artist’s generative work in the curated dialogue of the Winter Light exhibition. Villareal’s hypnotic, intricate patterns will appear larger-than-life in the most ambitious installation of the work to date. Comprised of 1300 unique, generative artworks, Cosmic Bloom is inspired by organic and biological structures, stellar phenomena, and atomic patterns. The projection at Southbank Centre is accompanied by a rotating playlist of six tracks by electronic music artist Kode9, creating an immersive soundscape for the experience. This presentation also marks the first time that this work will be exhibited for free to the public, in line with Outland's proud commitment to supporting rich engagement between traditional art and bleeding-edge innovation with digital media.
Cosmic Bloom is the second collection of tokenized artworks in Villareal’s Cosmologies series, following Cosmic Reef, 2022, released by Art Blocks. Advancing the generative processes to a more complex and integrated degree, Cosmic Bloom sees the artist bring his legendary practice of working with code to produce experiences in light into contact with new genres of algorithmic art made possible by decentralized web technologies. Cosmic Bloom’s inclusion in the Southbank Centre’s Winter Light exhibition marks the second time this work has been presented in London, following Outland’s smash-hit presentation at Stone Nest during Frieze Week, 2022.
Cosmic Bloom finds a welcome place in the Winter Light outdoor exhibition, curated by Cedar Lewisohn, Curator of Site Design at the Southbank Centre, with Assistant Curators Mark Healy and Madeleine Lynch, and Curatorial Assistant Helena Adalsteinsdottir. Cosmic Bloom is in good company alongside Marinella Senatore’s We Rise by Lifting Others, Tim Etchell’s Suddenly (Morning and Night), Kendell Geers’ Hope is A Four Letter Word, David Ogle’s Loomin, David Batchelor’s Sixty Minute Spectrum, Fred Tschida’s Sphere, Jakob Kvist’s Dichroic Sphere, and Denman + Gould w/ Maeve Polkinhorn’s Haven.
Free and open to the public, Cosmic Bloom will be visible to Londoners on the facade of the Royal Festival Hall daily from 4PM to 11PM. Notably, Cosmic Bloom will also be visible alongside Villareal’s groundbreaking public installation Illuminated River, which stretches from London Bridge to Lambeth Bridge along the River Thames.
Leo Villareal's work is focused on stripping systems down to their essence to better understand the underlying structures and rules that govern how they work. He is interested in lowest common denominators such as pixels or the zeros and ones in binary code. Starting at the beginning, using the simplest forms, Villareal begins to build elements within a framework. The work explores not only the physical but adds the dimension of time combining both spatial and temporal resolution. The resulting forms move, change, interact and ultimately grow into complex organisms that are inspired by mathematician John Conway's work with cellular automata and the Game of Life.
Villareal seeks to create his own sets of rules and central to his work is the element of chance. The artist's goal is to create a rich environment in which emergent behavior can occur without a preconceived outcome. He is an active participant in the process through the careful selection of compelling sequences. These selections are then further refined and layered through simple operations such as addition, subtraction and multiplication.
Parameters like opacity, speed and scale are also manipulated through the artist's custom software, creating compositions that are displayed in random order and for a random amount of time. Ultimately, the visual manifestation of code in light is at the core of Villareal's interest.
Villareal's work is in the permanent collections of many museums including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
On March 5, 2013 Villareal inaugurated The Bay Lights, a 1.8-mile-long installation of 25,000 white LED lights on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge which has since become a permanent installation.
In April 2021, Villareal completed Illuminated River, which unites 9 bridges in central London into a single, monumental work of public art.
