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Bill Viola, whose decades-long engagement with video was essential in establishing the medium as an integral part of contemporary art, died on July 12 at his home in Long Beach, California. He was 73 years old. The cause was complications related to Alzheimer’s disease. The news of his death was confirmed by the James Cohan Gallery.

Viola’s work focuses on the idea of ​​human consciousness and basic experiences such as birth, death and spirituality. He delved into mystical traditions from Zen Buddhism to Islamic Sufism, as well as Western devotional art from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in his videos, which often juxtaposed themes of life and death, light and darkness, noise and silence. These explorations were achieved by immersing viewers in image and sound with advanced technologies for their time.

“I used the camera and the first lens as a surrogate eye, to bring things closer, or to magnify them, to experiment with perception, to extend vision and make prolonged observations of simple objects,” Viola said in an interview in 2015 .“Once you do that, their essence becomes visible. So I guess I’ve always been interested in the inner life of the world around me.”

Beginning in the 1970s, Viola created video tapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast – all of which expanded the scope of the medium and established Viola as of its most notable practitioners. .

Bill Viola was born in 1951. He grew up in Queens and Westbury, New York, and attended PS 20 in Flushing, before receiving his BFA in experimental studios from Syracuse University in 1973. There, he studied visual art with the likes of Jack Nelson and electronic music with Franklin Morris.

Following his graduation, between 1973 and 1980, Viola studied and performed with composer David Tudor in the music group Rainforest, which later became known as Composers Inside Electronics. He also worked as a technical director at the pioneering video studio Art/tapes/22 in Florence, Italy from 1974 to 1976. During that time he encountered the work of other pioneering video artists such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, and Vito Acconci.

Viola was subsequently artist-in-residence at the WNET Thirteen Television Lab in New York between 1976 and 1983, where she created a series of works that premiered on television. She traveled to the Solomon Islands, Java, and Indonesia to record traditional performing arts between 1976 and 1977. Later that year, Viola was invited to show work at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, by cultural arts director Kira Perov, with whom the they were married and began a life-long collaboration.

He was appointed instructor in advanced video at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1983. He was the resident scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 1998 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000.

In 1985, Viola received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the fine arts, and later that decade, in 1989, he was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. His work was also part of some of the world’s most notable exhibitions, including Documenta VI in 1977, Documenta XI in 1992, the 1987 and 1993 editions of the Whitney Biennial, and the 2001 Venice Biennale.

In 1995, he represented the United States in the 46th edition of the Venice Biennale. For the pavilion, Viola produced the series of works “Buried Secrets,” including one of his best known works The Greetingwhich offers a contemporary interpretation of Pontormo’s oil painting The Visit (ca.1528–30). Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and New York’s Guggenheim Museum commissioned the digital fresco cycle in high definition video, titled Going On By Dayin 2002.

Viola’s work was the subject of a major 25-year survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1997, which subsequently toured internationally. His work has been the subject of major museum reviews in the years since, including at the Grand Palais in Paris (in 2014), the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence (2017), the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain (2017), and Foundation Barnes in Philadelphia (2019), as well as an exhibition pairing his work with that of Michelangelo at the Royal Academy of Art in London in 2019.

Viola is survived by his wife Kira Perov, who has been the executive director of his studio since 1978, and their two children.

“One thing that’s really exciting about video that has turned me on since I first saw this dazzling image back in 1970 is that it can be so much,” said Viola in a 1995 with Charlie Rose on the occasion of the Pavilion This USA at the Biennale. “Furthermore, what’s really exciting is I don’t think it’s really been since the Renaissance where artists have been able to use a medium that one could say. in the dominant form of communication in society.”

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