Pioneer of video art Bill Viola died at the age of 73

The New York video artist Bill Viola is dead. He died on Friday at the age of 73, his longtime gallery owner Jim Cohan confirmed to the German press agency dpa.

His production studio had previously published a post about the death on Instagram. Viola's wife and longtime artistic partner Kira Perov is the director of the studio in Long Beach, California. The post states that Viola died as a result of Alzheimer's disease.

Viola was born on January 25, 1951 in the New York borough of Queens. Since his first experiments in the 1970s, he has been regarded as a pioneer of video art. In his works, he dealt with cycles of life, death and rebirth. Viola called his pictures "visual poems". His famous works include "Nantes Triptych", a triptych of three video screens showing a woman giving birth, a blurred man floating in the water and his mother on the deathbed of her nursing home. In 2016, Viola created the work "Mary" about Mary, Mother of Sorrows, as a permanent installation for St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

Technology with poetry

International exhibitions of his works have attracted a great deal of attention, including in 2017 in Florence, where he had already worked in the 1970s, and in Hamburg's Deichtorhallen. The Grand Palais in Paris, the Museum Of Modern Art in New York and the 46th Venice Biennale also showed his work.

Gallery owner Cohan told dpa that he was always impressed by Viola's ability to combine technology with deeply felt poetry. Viola is survived by his wife and two sons, Blake and Andrei.