Trailblazing video artist Bill Viola dies at 73

Artist Bill Viola has died. The trailblazing creator of monumental video works died Friday at his home in Long Beach, Calif., of complications related to Alzheimer’s disease. He was 73.

The news was shared on the artist's Instagram feed.

Viola’s art focused on the metaphysical self. Often working with multiple large video screens showing actors moving in extreme slow motion, Viola’s ruminations on fundamental human themes like grief and spirituality were immersive and hypnotic.

"The one thing the video camera gave that a pen, pencil and paper or brush and canvas didn't, was the ability to look at the real world with an open eye, and to record events as they were occurring," said Viola in an interview with Charlie Rose in 1995. "And that kind of direction connection to life liberated me so much."

After graduating from Syracuse University in 1973, Viola created experimental artworks across a variety of media, including video and sound installations, electronic music performances, and works for television broadcast. His use of technology that was advanced for the time established Viola as a leader in the burgeoning field of video art.

"The subjects that he has broached in his work for decades — birth, death, the human condition — courageously addressed with intensity, purity and directness," gallerist Cheryl Haines, who worked on a project with Viola, told NPR. "Along with Nam June Paik, he was one of the pioneers."

Born in 1951, he grew up in Queens and Westbury, N.Y. His illustrious career included representing the U.S. at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and being the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum two years later.

A scene from The Tristan Project.

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Remy de la Mauviniere

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AP

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He also earned a reputation for the vivid visual landscapes he created in live performance settings. For The Tristan Project, a riff on Richard Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde made in collaboration with stage director Peter Sellars and then-Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Esa-Pekka Salonen, Viola broadcast images of a churning ocean, a row of trees at night, and a sunrise unfolding in real time on a 36-foot-long video screen, which hung above the stage.

"Bill Viola, like Raphael or Michelangelo, has come up with an image of the scale and scope and grandeur and immensity and genuine transcendence that Wagner was imagining," said Sellars in a feature about the production for NPR in 2007.

Viola is survived by his wife and longtime creative collaborator, Kira Perov, and two sons.