Bill Viola - Contemporary Art London Friday, October 13, 2006 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London

  • Exhibited

    Art Chicago, James Cohan Gallery (booth), May 12-15, 2000 (another example exhibited); Detroit Institute of Art, Bill Viola, September 15 – December 7, 2000 (another example exhibited); London, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, Five Angels for the Millennium and Other New Works, May 2 - July 21, 2001

  • Catalogue Essay

    A pioneer of video art, Bill Viola continues to create visually stunning, meditative works. In Eternal Return, completed in 2000, we witness an inverted figure leap and move up between two vertical flat-panel plasma screens splashing through a surface of water. The figure continues this transition, as if a metaphor for spiritual transformation.
    “Viola’s is an art for ‘everyman’, rather than for cognoscenti; an art of affect rather than distanced appraisal, but not art of pathos; an art of duration and absorption rather than for immediate satisfactions and revelation; an art that refuses the spectator control over the image, but which embeds its audience within its structures –an art, then, that refuses transcendence to the spectator, but which attracts us by its own inquiry into transcendence. Viola’s is an art that addresses ‘big issues’ –that life, death, ’why are we here?’ stuff –and addresses them without the kind of embarrassment or self-referential sense of parody manifested by this sentence. But those are of course, the kind of questions that ‘everyman’ continues to ask up to death.” (C. Townsend, The Art of Bill Viola, London, 2004)

30

Eternal Return

2000
Two flat-panel plasma screen monitors, two speakers, two channel DVD playback.
Installed dimensions: 84 x 24 x 3 in. (213.4 x 60.1 x 7.6 cm)
This work is from an edition of five and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

Estimate
£350,000 - 450,000 

Sold for £377,600

Contemporary Art

14 Oct 2006, 7pm
London