The Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto is pleased to support the exhibition Solar by Italian artist Quayola.
SOLAR
by
Quayola
EXHIBITION
October 16 to October 19, 2025
7:30PM to 11:00PM
THE BENTWAY
250 Fort York Blvd
(under the Gardiner)
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The Bentway transforms the Gardiner into a glowing horizon with SOLAR, an expansive light installation by Italian artist Quayola. Over four nights only, audiences can experience a city sunset reimagined through cutting-edge technology and contemporary art.
Inspired by the shifting colours and patterns that emerge when day meets night, SOLAR uses a mesmerizing robotic arm to direct hundreds of precisely choreographed beams of light shining across the space. The work transforms the sun’s journey into sweeping arcs of light and shadow, blending astronomy with coding to create a living and charged environment accompanied by Quayola’s powerful audio score.
The experience debuted earlier this summer as the headlining artwork of Rome’s Videocittà festival (who co-commissioned the project with The Bentway), and the Toronto presentation has been tailored for the Gardiner Expressway’s distinctive concrete canopy. Responding to the site’s constant shade, SOLAR invites audiences to explore the looping performance from multiple vantage points, encouraging visitors to linger and watch the spectacle unfold again and again.
SOLAR will serve as the closing chapter of The Bentway’s 2025 Sun/Shade program, which reconsiders the city’s relationship and sun and shade in response to a changing climate.
ABOUT QUAYOLA
Quayola is an Italian artist whose practice uses technology to explore the tensions between the real and the artificial, the figurative and the abstract, the ancient and the contemporary. Through immersive installations and generative systems, he reinterprets classical subjects such as landscape painting, sculpture, and iconography using software and robotics. His work has been featured at leading institutions and festivals around the world, including the V&A Museum, Palais de Tokyo, Ars Electronica, and the Sundance Film Festival. In 2024, Quayola was invited to create a new immersive work in New York for the Times Square Midnight Moment.
Presented in partnership with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto.