This was confirmed to the German press agency dpa by his long-time gallery owner Jim Cohan. His production studio had previously published a post regarding the death on Instagram. Viola’s wife and long-time artistic partner Kira Perov is the director of the studio in Long Beach, California. The post states that Viola died from the effects 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 considered a pioneer of video art. In his work, he dealt with cycles of life, death and rebirth. Viola called his pictures “visual poems”. Among other things, he became famous for “Nantes Triptych”, a triptych made up of three video screens showing a woman giving birth, a blurred man floating in the water and his mother on her deathbed in her nursing home. In 2016, Viola created the work “Mary” regarding the Sorrowful Mother Mary as a permanent installation for St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
International exhibitions of his works attracted a lot of attention, including in 2017 in Florence, where he had already worked in the 1970s, and in the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. The Grand Palais in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the 46th Venice Biennale also showed his works. In 1994, Viola was also shown in Salzburg: the Kunstverein showed some of his installations in the Künstlerhaus.
Gallery owner Cohan told dpa that he was always impressed by how Viola was able to combine technology with deeply felt poetry. In addition to his wife, Viola leaves behind two sons, Blake and Andrei.
