A flood of videos flooded the Grand Palais in 2014, leaving few visitors unmoved by this sensory experience. They were by Bill Viola. The American, one of the pioneers of video art, died at the age of 73 from Alzheimer’s disease, his studio announced in a press release on Saturday.
“Bill Viola, one of the world’s most important contemporary artists,” passed away peacefully at his home Friday in Long Beach, California. He is survived by his wife and longtime collaborator Kira Perov, the studio’s director, and two sons, Blake and Andrei.
VIDEO. Bill Viola: the Grand Palais exhibition
Born in New York in 1951, Bill Viola studied painting and electronic music at Syracuse University (New York State). He read the mystics and quickly became passionate about the emerging video art. The artist then drew his inspiration from Renaissance painters, Goya, or Hieronymus Bosch, but also from the Book of the Dead of ancient Egypt.
Kira Petrov said of her partner in 2017, on the sidelines of an exhibition in Florence, that he had been “very influenced by the extreme emotions experienced in these beautiful paintings” of the Renaissance. “It spoke of grief, of mourning, and that really shaped his work,” she added.
Bill Viola seeks to “sculpt time” with video, particularly by using slow motion, and avoids using special effects as much as possible. In 2014, the Grand Palais brought together his major works, a retrospective covering forty years of creation.