Bill Viola

About Bill's Work

Bill Viola is an artist who uses video and electronic media to explore the phenomena of sense perception as a language of the body and an avenue to self-knowledge.

Since 1973, Viola has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, and works for television broadcast. His 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. His works focus on universal human experiences, such as birth, death, and the unfolding of consciousness, and have roots in both Eastern and Western art and spiritual traditions. His works include the Slowly Turning Narrative (1992), Tiny Deaths (1993), and The Messenger (1996), a video installation commissioned for the nine-hundred-year-old Durham Cathedral in Northern England. In 2002, he created one of his most ambitious projects, Going Forth By Day, a five-part, projected, digital, fresco cycle.

Biography

Viola has produced over 150 works that have been shown in museums, galleries, film festivals, and on public television worldwide. Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized by such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark.

Viola received a B.F.A (1973) from Syracuse University.

Last updated January 1, 2005.

Published on August 1, 1989