Florence Private Tours with Local Guides

Bill Viola. Electronic Renaissance in Florence

Who is Bill Viola? Today Bill Viola is an established videoart performer known all over the planet, but did you know that he produced his first works in Florence? The cradle of the Renaissance city influenced one of the most important contemporary artists in video art. 

Bill Viola, a New Yorker born in 1951, son of an Italian from Pavia, will be devoted the next adventure of the Palazzo Strozzi which will expose its masterpieces from March 10 to July 23, 2017 in RINASCIMENTO ELETTRONICO. In 1972 Maria Gloria Bicocchi and her husband Giancarlo open in Florence Art / tapes / 22, probably the most important center in Europe for the production of video art for all the Seventies.

One of the first guests to be swept up in private and working life of the spouses is Bill Viola. In 1973, just graduated to Siracuse University in Visual and Performing Arts, Bill Viola is in Florence, a guest for two years in the house / workshop / art studio of Maria Gloria Bicocchi and he sleeps for eighteen months in the bedroom of her son Stefano. An accurate worker, punctual, fussy, productive and tireless: immediately produced movies. 

The work that introduces the next exhibit in Florence is ‘Emergence’ realized in 2002 for the J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles is a free digital reinterpretation of the Pietà by Masolino, a fresco of the Sant'Andrea Collegiate Museum of Empoli.

The work of the early Renaissance will remain an inspiration, a new future and a new reading is the one who wants to leave Bill Viola. The work in digital narrates for moving images the elevation of the body by Mary and St. John the Evangelist: a new elevation - deposition.

Florence today is the only city that can claim the self-portrait of Bill Viola in the permanent collection of portraits in the Uffizi Gallery, the first work on the move in the museum.

In 2013 Bill Viola creates ‘Self Portrait, Submerged’ and it’s the only self-portrait realised by Bill Viola and trough the Florentine museum gift to the whole world.

Bill Viola does not like looking at his figure and so to realise its self-portrait was very difficult.

A work created in a huge tank completely transparent in plexiglas, staged in his studio and lighted from the outside; a digital effect is the background with river stones and the effect of water in motion is created by the collaborators that with their hands create the gentle wave effect.

All taken from an overhead camera and that Bill Viola presents us attached to a wall, vertically challenging us to look into his eyes. Bill Viola is always accompanied in his art by a great woman: Kira Perov.

Kira is a curator with Arturo Galansino the next exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi and in Bill life is his wife and his Executive Director.

A formidable couple who joined forty years ago in life and art. Kira Perov and her husband Bill Viola © all pictures are by the net, for any problem of copyright contact us and we provide to remove all your pictures