For his third solo exhibition at Anthony d'Offay Gallery, the pioneering American video artist Bill Viola has created an extraordinary and moving series of new video and sound installations.

Bill Viola's The Quintet of the Astonished, shown at the National Gallery "Encounters" exhibition, was one of a number of works by the artist, including Nantes Triptych at the Tate Modern, on view in London last year. The Quintet of the Astonished, based on the Hieronymous Bosch painting The Mocking of Christ, provided a starting point for a series of new works on the Passions. Discussing the relationship between the high-resolution flat panel displays that he is using for the current exhibition and mediaeval devotional panels, Viola has said:

I've been looking at the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, when making art drastically changed. You not only had the development of vantage-point perspective, but you also had a population that was becoming increasingly mobile thanks to the money generated by a rising merchant class. People were hitting the roads, and all of a sudden there was a demand for private, devotional illustrated prayer books. So artists started making little panel paintings that were latched and hinged, that you could close and take with you. When you got to your inn, you could open it up and do your prayers it was everyone getting their own laptop, basically.

On the ground floor of this exhibition is a "hall of images", a series of intimate and intense tableaux vivants depicting actors going through variations of what Viola sees as the four primary emotions: joy, fear, anger and sadness. Shot in ultraslow-motion, Viola makes visible experiences that are normally beyond the threshold of perception.

The upstairs gallery represents a "hall of vision" and consists of a monumental installation entitled Five Angels for the Millennium, Bill Viola's offering to the new millennium. Five figures descend into and ascend out of water, at times hovering above the surface. This piece is the culmination of a number of earlier studies of figures moving through water and is his most ambitious project on the theme to date.

Bill Viola is widely recognised as the leading video artist on the international scene. Since 1972 he 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. Viola's single channel videotapes have been broadcast and presented cinematically around the world, while his writings have been published and anthologised for international readers.


Since the early 1970s, Viola has used video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. Clearly at odds with the cynicism of his age, his works focus on universal human experiences ­ birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness ­ and have roots in both Eastern and Western art, as well as Islamic Sufism, Christian mysticism, and Zen Buddhism. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as vital form of con temporary art, and in so doing has helped to expand its scope both in terms of technology, content and historical reach.

Born in New York in 1951, Viola received his BFA from Syracuse University (1973). In 1995 he was selected to represent the United States at the 46th Venice Biennale with an exhibition titled Buried Secrets. In 1997 the Whitney Museum of American Art organised Bill Viola: A 25-Year Survey that toured the United States and Europe from 1997-2000. Venues included Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California (1997) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1998) Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1998) Museum für Moderne Kunst, and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany (1999) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California (1999) and The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (1999-2000). In 1998 Viola was a Scholar-in-Residence at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and Humanities at the Getty Center, Los Angeles.

He works at his studio in Long Beach, California, where he also lives with his wife and manager Kira Perov, and their two children.