Bill Viola (1951–2024) is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading artists. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and, in so doing, has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content and historical reach. For 40 years, he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces and works for television broadcast. Viola’s video installations — total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound — employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. They are shown in museums and galleries worldwide and are found in many distinguished collections.
His single-channel videotapes have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically, while his writings have been extensively published and translated for international readers. Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences — birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness — and have roots in both Eastern and Western art, as well as spiritual traditions including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism. Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way.
Bill Viola received his BFA in Experimental Studios from Syracuse University in 1973, where he studied visual art with Jack Nelson and electronic music with Franklin Morris. During the 1970s he lived for 18 months in Florence, Italy, as technical director of production for Art/Tapes/22, one of the first video art studios in Europe, and then traveled widely to study and record traditional performing arts in the Solomon Islands, Java, Bali and Japan. Viola was invited to be artist-in-residence at the WNET Channel 13 Television Laboratory in New York from 1976 to 1980, where he created a series of works, many of which were premiered on television. In 1977, Viola was invited to show his videotapes at La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia) by cultural arts director Kira Perov who, a year later, joined him in New York, where they married and began a lifelong collaboration working and traveling together.
In 1979, Viola and Perov traveled to the Sahara desert, Tunisia to record mirages. The following year, Viola was awarded a U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, and they lived in Japan for a year and a half, where they studied Zen Buddhism with Master Daien Tanaka and Viola became the first artist-in-residence at Sony Corporation’s Atsugi research laboratories. Viola and Perov returned to the U. S. at the end of 1981 and settled in Long Beach, California, initiating projects to create art works based on medical imaging technologies of the human body at a local hospital, animal consciousness at the San Diego Zoo and fire-walking rituals among the Hindu communities in Fiji. In 1987, they traveled for five months throughout the American Southwest photographing Native American rock art sites and recording nocturnal desert landscapes with a series of specialized video cameras. More recently, at the end of 2005, they journeyed with their two sons to Dharamsala, India to record a prayer blessing with the Dalai Lama.
Music has always been an important part of Viola’s life and work. From 1973 to 1980 he performed with avant-garde composer David Tudor as a member of his Rainforest ensemble, later called Composers Inside Electronics. Viola has also created videos to accompany music compositions including 20th-century composer Edgard Varèse’s Déserts in 1994 with the Ensemble Modern, and, in 2000, a three-song video suite for the rock group Nine Inch Nails’ world tour. In 2004, Viola began collaborating with director Peter Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen to create a new production of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, which was presented in project form by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in December 2004 and in 2007 at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The complete opera received its world premiere at the Opéra National de Paris, Bastille in April 2005.
Since the early 1970s, Viola’s video art works have been seen all over the world. Exhibitions include Bill Viola: Installations and Videotapes, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1987), and Bill Viola: Unseen Images, seven installations toured six venues in Europe (1992–1994), organized by the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Kira Perov. Viola represented the U.S. at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995 with Buried Secrets, a series of five new installation works. In 1997, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized Bill Viola: A 25-Year Survey that included over 35 installations and videotapes and traveled for two years to six museums in the U.S. and Europe. In 2002, Viola completed his most ambitious project, Going Forth By Day, a five-part projected digital “fresco” cycle, his first work in High-Definition video, commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Bill Viola: The Passions, a new series inspired by late medieval and early Renaissance art, was exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in 2003 then traveled to the National Gallery, London, the Fondación “La Caixa” in Madrid and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
One of the largest exhibitions of Viola’s installations to date, Bill Viola: Hatsu-Yume (“First Dream”) (2006-2007), drew over 340,000 visitors to the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. In 2007, nine installations were shown at the Zahenta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; and Ocean Without a Shore was created for the 15th-century Church of San Gallo during the Venice Biennale. In 2008, Bill Viola: Visioni interiori, a survey exhibition organized by Kira Perov, was presented in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. In 2014, 20 works were shown at the Grand Palais, Paris, in his largest survey exhibition to date, and a few months later, part one of the St. Paul’s commission, Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), was installed in the London cathedral.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park in West Yorkshire, U.K., presented a large exhibition of installations in its chapel and galleries in 2015. Vinyl Factory also produced the first Viola LP, The Talking Drum, that year, featuring sound works from 1979–82 and presenting them in an underground car park in London. The first Viola monograph summarizing 40 years of creative output, edited by Kira Perov with text by John G. Hanhardt, was published by Thames & Hudson, and later reprinted in German (Sieveking Verlag), Spanish with Basque insert (La Fábrica, Bilbao, 2017) and Portuguese (SESC, Brazil, 2018). Mary, the second part of the commission for St. Paul’s Cathedral was installed in London, 2016, and Viola’s first large exhibition in Washington, D.C. opened at the National Portrait Gallery the same year. Four large-scale exhibitions and two smaller shows were organized for 2017: at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; in the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Guggenheim Bilbao Museum for a “retrospective” of works ranging from 1976 to 2014, the largest show to date, with the greatest attendance; Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou, China; and exhibitions in Uppsala Cathedral, Sweden, and Montreal (DHCArt).
In 2018, SESC (Serviço Social do Comécio) in São Paulo presented a group of 12 works for the opening of their new facility, Sesc Avenida Paulista. A reprise of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Peter Sellars’ production with four hours of video, was part of the 2018 season at the Opéra national de Paris with nine performances. Vía Mistica, an exhibition occupying four venues in the ancient city of Cuenca, Spain, was installed in three churches and the Museo de Arte Abstracto, a hanging house, in this UNESCO World Heritage Site. Transfigurations series work Visitation (2008) was inaugurated in Uppsala Cathedral, Sweden, for permanent installation in one of its chapels. The first video artwork entered the collection of the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Viola’s The Silent Sea, 2002) and went on permanent display in December.
Twelve video works were installed together with 14 drawings and one marble by Michelangelo at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, 2019, in a major exhibition titled Bill Viola/Michelangelo: Life, Death, Rebirth, a dialogue between two artists, centuries apart, who shared related concerns. For their 1,000th-year anniversary, the St Moritz Church, Augsburg, Germany, hosted an exhibition of four smaller works. In June, Ocean Without a Shore (2007) was permanently installed in PLANTA, Lleida, Spain. Seven video pieces, including the rarely shown He Weeps for You (1976) and Pneuma (1994/2009), were exhibited at The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in a show titled I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like: The Art of Bill Viola. Later in the year, an exhibition of 10 works opened at the Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul, followed by Mirrors of the Unseen in Casa Milà/La Pedrera, modernist architect Antoni Gaudi’s masterpiece in Barcelona. Satellite exhibitions of one work each were shown simultaneously in the Museum of Montserrat; in Bòlit Centre d’Art Contemporain, Girona; in the Museo Episcopal de Vic; as well as the permanent installation in PLANTA. In this Catalonia-wide celebration, further programs were scheduled at the Gran Teatre del Liceu and Palau de la Musica in Barcelona.
The exhibition at La Pedrera traveled to Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Madrid in February of 2020. Not long after opening, the coronavirus began to spread and the exhibition was closed for a time, eventually reopening. Many other projects scheduled for the year were either paused or postponed to 2021 and beyond. In spite of all the challenges and restrictions in place over the course of the year, October opened with Bill Viola: Purification at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, followed by four Martyrs series works on view at the Bangkok Art Biennale in Thailand, finishing the year with a solo exhibition of 16 works, Bill Viola, Encounter at Busan Museum of Art in South Korea. 2021 opened with a solo exhibition at the Stavanger Art Museum, Norway, Bill Viola: Into the Light, followed by 23 works at The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, featuring a performance of Déserts (1994), video by Bill Viola and music by Edgard Varèse. April 2021 saw the opening of Bill Viola: Slowly Turning Narrative at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, finishing out the year with a solo exhibition at Amos Rex in Helsinki, Finland, titled Bill Viola: Inner Journey, which opened at the end of September. At around the same time, two Bill Viola works were shown as a solo installation at the Volga-Vyatka branch of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Arsenal) in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.
Several solo exhibitions for 2022 included Bill Viola: Icons of Light, at the Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy; Bill Viola: Tiempo Suspendido, Ex Teresa Arte Actual,” Mexico City, Mexico, which traveled the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), Mexico. In between the two solo shows in Mexico was Bill Viola, at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria; ending the year with a revival of the Tristan Project with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Following the presentation in Los Angeles, the production traveled to the Opéra national de Paris for a fully staged revival in January 2023. On a winter evening during the Paris Tristan revival, on which there was no performance scheduled, the Philharmonie de Paris presented Edgard Varèse’s Déserts in concert, with the eponymously titled video accompaniment by Bill Viola, subsequently also performed separately in Budapest, Hungary and Madrid, Spain. Sony’s The Night Journey game also featured prominently this year in a touring exhibition throughout major cities in Brazil, as well as part of group exhibitions in Ramat Gan, Israel and a game-play version touring the major cities of Spain. Opening simultaneously were a large solo exhibition in the grand halls of the Palazzo Reale, Milan, and a show at James Cohan Gallery in New York featured two iconic installation works originating in the late 1970s. In October of 2023, Bill Viola, a large solo exhibition of 18 works opened in La Boverie, Liège, Belgium and in December, and an exhibition of Moving Stillness: Mount Rainier 1979 (1979) at the Orlando Museum of Art.
Opening the year 2024, a collection of Viola’s work held by ARTISTS ROOMS was exhibited at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter, Great Britain. Followed by a series of group shows over the summer, including the Biennale d'art contemporain De Renava, Bonafacio, France (Corsica); The Sleepers (1992) on view at The Giverny Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montréal, Canada; another presentation of Moving Stillness: Mount Rainier 1979, this time at the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina, in September.
Viola is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1989). In 2006, he was awarded Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government. In 2009, he received the XXI Catalonia International Prize in Barcelona, Spain, and, in 2011, was awarded the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale art award in the category of painting. Viola was elected an Honorary Royal Academician in 2017.