Bill Viola Coming To Warsaw

The American Embassy is working to support a solo exhibition at Zacheta National Gallery of Art May 11 through July 1 of the highly distinguished artist, video art pioneer Bill Viola, announced Cultural Attaché James Wolfe. This will be the first solo exhibition in Poland of Viola’s work and the only one on this scale in Central and Eastern Europe. Viola himself will attend the opening.  Bill Viola is a pioneer in the medium of video art and is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading artists, instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art. For over 35 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast.

Viola’s 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. They are shown in museums and galleries worldwide and are found in many distinguished collections. His single channel videotapes have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically, while his writings have been extensively published, and translated for international readers. Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. 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 spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way.

Bill Viola was born in 1951. His works have been displayed in the most prestigious museums and galleries, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art; the Guggenheim Museums in New York, Berlin, and Bilbao; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the National Gallery in London; and Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. Bill Viola is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1989, and in Germany in 1993 the first Medienkunstpreis, presented jointly by Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, and Siemens Kulturprogramm. He holds honorary doctorates from Syracuse University (1995), The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1997), California Institute of the Arts (2000), and the Royal College of Art, London (2004) among others, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000.