US pioneer of video art Bill Viola is dead

The New York video artist Bill Viola died on Friday at the age of 73, his long-time gallery owner Jim Cohan confirmed to dpa on Saturday.

His production studio had previously published a post about 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 as a result of Alzheimer's disease.

Viola was born on January 25, 1951, in the New York borough of Queens.

He has been regarded as a pioneer of video art since his first experiments in the 1970s. In his works, he focused on cycles of life, death and rebirth.

Viola called his pictures "visual poems." Among others, "Nantes Triptych," a triptych of three video screens showing a woman giving birth, a blurred man floating in the water and his mother on the deathbed of her nursing home, became famous.

In 2016, Viola created the work "Mary" as a permanent installation for St Paul's Cathedral in London, which it describes as being "comprised of vertical video screens, showing different depictions of the life of the Mother of Christ."

International exhibitions of his works have attracted a great deal of attention, including in 2017 in Florence, where he had already worked in the 1970s, and in Hamburg's Deichtorhallen.

The Grand Palais in Paris, the Museum Of Modern Art in New York and the 46th Venice Biennale also showed his work.

Gallery owner Cohan told dpa that he was always impressed by Viola's ability to combine technology with deeply felt poetry.

Viola is survived by his wife and two sons, Blake and Andrei.