Bill Viola, a pioneering figure in video art, has died at 73 due to complications related to Alzheimer’s disease. The artist’s death was confirmed by his official Instagram account and James Cohan Gallery.
Born in 1951 in Queens, New York, Viola was known for his profound use of large-scale video technology to explore themes related to the human condition. After earning his BFA from Syracuse University in 1973, he rapidly rose as a prominent figure in the experimental art scene in New York City. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Viola collaborated with notable figures such as composer David Tudor and director Peter Sellars.
Viola served as the technical director at video studio Art/Tapes/22 in Florence, Italy from 1974 to 1976, where he worked with peers in video art such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, and Vito Acconci. Following this, he became the artist-in-residence at WNET Thirteen Television Laboratory in New York until 1980, where he produced several works that debuted on television.
In 1977, Viola presented his work at the La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, after receiving an invitation from art director Kira Perov, whom he would later marry and collaborate with throughout his career. Over the next decade, Viola received international recognition, earning the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 1989. In 1995, he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, where he presented his immersive video series, “Buried Secrets.”
Viola’s first major survey opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1997, spanning 25 years of the artist’s career. It was followed by other major exhibitions held at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2014, the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence in 2017, the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain in 2017, and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in 2019.
Outside of his art practice, Viola worked as an instructor at the California Institute of the Arts, beginning in 1983, and served as a scholar-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute in 1998. Meanwhile, Viola regularly held solo exhibitions with James Cohan Gallery in New York well into his later years, including a show titled “Inverted Birth” in 2016 that featured six video pieces.
