Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK) presents a significant exhibition by pioneering American video and installation artist, Bill Viola. It is the most extensive exhibition in the UK by the artist for over 10 years. The immersive exhibition in YSP’s Chapel and Underground Gallery features installations from the last 20 years of Viola’s career and premieres a new work, “The Trial“.
Considering universal themes of life, death, love and spirituality, Viola gives tangible visual form to abstract psychological and metaphysical experiences. He explores facets of the human condition and holds a stark and intimate mirror to our strength, fragility, and the impulses and inevitabilities that unite us.
The eight works installed in the Underground Gallery continue Viola’s investigations of the unseeable, the unknowable, and the place between birth and death. His new work, “The Trial” (2015), depicts, in Viola’s words, “five stages of awakening through a series of violent transformations.”
The exhibition also features three works from the “Transfigurations” series, which reflect on the passage of time and the process by which a person’s inner being is transformed. The earliest work in the exhibition, The “Veiling” (1995), was created for the US Pavilion at the 46th Venice Biennale.
Inside the 18th century Chapel, a short walk across YSP’s historic deer park, “Fire Woman” and “Tristan’s Ascension” (both 2005), draw on the ancient story of lovers gripped by a passion that is blind to duty, honour and social obligation and which can only be consummated beyond the grave.
Bill Viola at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
10.10.2015 – 10.04.2016
Images courtesy of Kira Perov, Bill Viola
Discover: www.ysp.co.uk
