American artist Bill Viola (1951-2024) was internationally recognized as one of today’s leading artists. Since the 1970s, he created ground-breaking video artworks and, in doing so, was instrumental in establishing this as a vital form of contemporary art practice. Utilizing state-of-the-art technologies, Viola produced videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat-panel video pieces, and works for television broadcasts.
Viola used video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. Exploring fundamental human experiences including birth, death and changing states of consciousness, the artist engaged with Eastern and Western art traditions, as well as proposing religious or spiritual ideas deriving from Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism.
Viola’s art led to him traveling the world, and in 1979 both he and his wife and long-time collaborator Kira Perov traveled to the Sahara desert, Tunisia, to record mirages. The following year Viola was awarded a US and Japan Creative Artist Fellowship and they lived in Japan for over a year where they studied Zen Buddhism. Viola also became the first artist in residence at Sony Corporation's Atsugi research laboratories. Viola and Perov returned to the US at the end of 1981 and settled in Long Beach, California. In 1987, they travelled for five months throughout the American Southwest, photographing Native American rock art sites and recording nocturnal desert landscapes. 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 was always an important part of Viola's life and work, and in 2000, he created a three-song video suite for the rock group Nine Inch Nails' world tour.
Among Viola’s numerous solo exhibitions since 1973 were Projects, the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1979); Bill Viola: Survey of a Decade, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas (1988); Bill Viola, Fukui Fine Arts Museum, Fukui, Japan (1989); Bill Viola: Unseen Images, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (1993-4). Viola represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1995. In 1997, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York organized a major 25-year survey of his work, which traveled to six museums in Europe and the United States. In 2002, Viola presented his most ambitious work to date, the digital ‘fresco’ cycle Going Forth By Day, commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Since then, significant exhibitions of Viola’s work have been organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum (2003) and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2006), and Blain Southern in London (2011 and 2013). In 2011, he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale in the category of painting, a prestigious global art prize awarded annually by the Japan Art Association.
Bill Viola lived and worked in Long Beach, California.
