Paul Tzanetopoulos
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Paul Tzanetopoulos is a Greek-American conceptual artist based in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, working across video, light, sound, and large-scale public installation. Born in Athens, Greece, he has lived and worked in Los Angeles for more than 25 years.
Tzanetopoulos presented one of the first video installation projections in a Los Angeles gallery in 1974, a computer-run intermedia piece shown at the Ruth Schaffner Gallery. Since then his practice has moved between painting, drawing, film, projection, and interactive systems, unified less by medium than by a recurring set of concerns: how people process information, emotion, and environment through time-based media.
"I'm a conceptually driven, interdisciplinary artist who works with the medium best suited to conveying the work's conceptual root"
he has said of his approach.
He is best known for Kinetic Light Installation (untitled), 2000, the public art component of the LAX Gateway Pylon Project. Working with Los Angeles World Airports and the city's Cultural Affairs Department, he designed a lighting system for 26 translucent glass pylons that cycles through more than 30,000 colors over a three-hour sequence, timed to represent the diversity of Los Angeles and the planet. Completed for $15 million and inaugurated in August 2000, it remains the largest permanent public art lighting installation in the world, visible to arriving passengers from 3,000 feet.
Other public commissions include e/motion 3, 2004, a triptych video projection built from six live camera feeds on a translucent facade at the West Hollywood Gateway, and Breezy and Delightful, 1993, a kinetic disk installation for LA Metro's Blue Line. He has completed more than 30 public art commissions since 1992, and his work is held in LACMA's Permanent Collection of 20th Century Art and the Permanent Collection of the United States Consulate General in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
He received an MFA with Honors in Fine Art from the University of California, Irvine, and a BFA with Honors from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was named Outstanding Fine Arts Graduate. Recent exhibitions include three solo shows at as-is Gallery in Los Angeles (2024, 2022, 2020) and a 2024 commission for LA Metro.
With the original pylons now dismantled to accommodate LAX's roadway overhaul, Tzanetopoulos is developing a new iteration of the installation intended to be visible for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. An exhibition tracing the pylons' full process and history, alongside a broader look at his archive, is currently on view at the Tom Bradley International Terminal.