Bill Viola: The Passions
The National Gallery, London
22 October 2003 - 4 January 2004
BILL VIOLA (b.1951) is one of the world’s leading video artists. This major solo exhibition shows 14 works by Bill Viola dating from 1995 to the present, most unseen in the UK, and including two specially commissioned pieces. His work is both at the forefront of technical innovation and deeply rooted in the art of the past. Drawing on images and ideas from the art and philosophy of both European and Eastern traditions he produces work of enormous intensity. The focus of this exhibition will be his ongoing series ‘The Passions’, exploring the power, range and expression of the human emotions. These will be seen with a selection of other art works, including paintings from the National Gallery collection.
The National Gallery’s relationship with Bill Viola began when he was invited to contribute a work in response to a painting in the Gallery’s collection for the exhibition ‘Encounters’ (2000). Taking Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Christ Mocked (The Crowning of Thorns)’ as his starting point, Viola produced his ‘The Quintet of the Astonished’, in which a group of five people, shown in extreme slow motion, display a range of conflicting emotions, from sorrow to bliss.
‘Quintet’ was the first completed work in ‘The Passions’. Deeply influenced by the devotional imagery of the 15th and 16th centuries, these works are for the most part shown on flat digital panel screens whose size, display, texture and sharpness of definition imitate portable painted panels. In ‘Dolorosa’, for example, two hinged screens each show a man and a woman crying in slow motion. This evokes diptychs showing the Man of Sorrows and the weeping Virgin, such as the National Gallery’s examples by Dieric Bouts. Despite the New Testament echoes in this and many of Viola’s works, these figures are anonymous and contemporary, their situation secular and undefined. Another work, ‘Catherine’s Room’ comprises five small screens inspired by the narrative predella panels of Italian Renaissance altarpieces.
Two important works - both previously unseen in the UK - provide a prelude to ‘The Passions’. The exhibition will open with Bill Viola’s first work made in response to an Old Master painting, ‘The Greeting’ (1995) inspired by Pontormo’s ‘The Visitation’, in which a 40-second ambiguous encounter between three women is slowed to last ten minutes. In contrast the powerful and dramatic ‘The Crossing’ (1996) is an all encompassing video and sound installation: on two sides of a single central screen a figure is simultaneously consumed by the elemental forces of fire and water.
His new works, ‘Emergence’ and ‘Observance’ continue ‘The Passions’ series and both derive from Old Master paintings. In ‘Emergence’, based on a fresco by Masolino, two women receive the lifeless body of a man from an overflowing well in a work that can be read as symbolising birth and resurrection. ‘Observance’ is a narrow, vertical composition (derived from Dürer’s ‘Four Apostles’ in Munich) in which people respond to a disturbing sight that occurs out of frame. Their intense emotions and reactions are seen in hyper-slow movement, creating an absorbing and mesmerising ritual of grief.
The exhibition has been organised by the J. Paul Getty Museum in collaboration with The National Gallery. It has been curated by John Walsh, director emeritus at the J.Paul Getty Museum, and in London, by Alexander Sturgis.
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
Trafalgar Square, London
