Bill Viola and Italian Masters at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Running from 10 March to 23 July 2017, with works covering his long career and interacting with the architecture of Palazzo Strozzi and with celebrated masterpieces of the Renaissance.

The retrospective, curated by Arturo Galansino and Kira Perov, is a unique event reviewing a career invariably marked by a combination of intense technological research and deep aesthetic reflection, stretching from his early experiments with video in the 1970s right up to the large installations of the 2000s that have drawn the public's attention with their strong impact on the senses. In a totally unprecedented layout, the exhibition will also use the Renaissance context of Palazzo Strozzi to fuel an extraordinary dialogue between the classic and the contemporary through direct interaction between Viola's work and masterpieces by the old masters of the past that have served as sources of inspiration for this American artist and marked the development of his style.

Bill Viola, who was born in New York in 1951, is internationally recognized as one of the most celebrated and important contemporary artists, producing video installations, sound environments and performances that offer the public spectacular experiences of immersion in space, image and sound. In exploring spirituality, experience and perception, Viola explores mankind itself; people, bodies and faces are always the leading players in his works, with their poetic and strongly symbolic style in which man is called on to interact with such forces and energies of nature as water and fire, light and dark, the cycle of life and the cycle of rebirth.

Creating an exhibition of Bill Viola's art in Palazzo Strozzi, in an environment that includes both the Piano Nobile and the Strozzina undercroft, also means celebrating the special relationship that the artist has always had with the city of Florence, because it was in this very city that he first embarked on his career as a video artist when he was technical director of art/tapes/22, a center for the production and documentation of video run by Maria Gloria Conti Bicocchi, from 1974 to 1976. And it is in the city of Florence, but also throughout the rest of Tuscany, that Palazzo Strozzi will be extending the exhibition experience thanks to important partnerships with museums and other venues in the region where the artist's work will be on display, extolling his rapport with the history and art of Tuscany.

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Photo: Bill Viola (New York 1951), Emergence, 2002, 11'40”, Color High Definition video rear projection on screen mounted on wall in dark room; Performers: Weba Garretson, John Hay, Sarah Steben. Long Beach, CA, Bill Viola Studio