ART-PRESENTATION: Bill Viola/Michelangelo

Exploring the universal themes of human existence and experience, the exhibition “Bill Viola/Michelangelo”, is the first exhibition at the Royal Academy devoted largely to video art and brings together the work of Bill Viola and Michelangelo. While the works were produced centuries apart and in radically different media, the exhibition reveals the artists’ shared preoccupations with mortality, spirituality and transcendence. Life Death Rebirth affirms each artist as the master of his medium.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Royal Academy of Arts Archive

The exhibition “Bill Viola/Michelangelo”, creates an artistic exchange between these two artists and is a unique opportunity to see major works from Viola’s long career and some of the greatest drawings by Michelangelo, together for the first time. The exhibition features 12 major video installations by Viola, from 1977 to 2013, shown alongside 15 works by Michelangelo. They include 14 highly finished drawings, considered to be the high point of Renaissance drawing, as well as “Taddei Tondo”, the artist’s only marble sculpture in the UK. Viola first encountered the works of the Italian Renaissance in Florence in the 1970s where he spent some of his formative years. A residency at the J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, in 1998 renewed his interest in Renaissance art and in the shared affinities with his own practice. In 2006, Viola visited the Print Room at Windsor Castle to see Michelangelo’s exquisite drawings, which he had known in reproduction since his youth. The meeting proved a catalyst for the exhibition, which evolved as a conversation between Viola and Martin Clayton, one of the curators of the exhibition. Rather than setting up direct comparisons or suggesting that Michelangelo has been an instrumental influence on Viola’s work, the exhibition examine the affinities between them, bringing together specific works to explore resonances in their treatment of the fundamental questions: the nature of being, the transience of life, and the search for a greater meaning beyond mortality. Michelangelo’s drawings included were executed in the last 35 years of his life, some as gifts and expressions of love for close friends, others as private meditations on his own mortality. Religious imagery of the Virgin and Child, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection reflect on the presence of death and the eternal. In others, references to Classical mythology act as metaphors for the human condition. The exhibition is conceived as an immersive journey through the cycles of life, exploring the transience and tumult of existence and the possibility of rebirth. It begins and ends with a pairing of works that reflect on a central paradox: the presence of death in life. Michelangelo’s “The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist” (c. 1504-05), known as the “Taddei Tondo”, depicts the Baptist holding a fluttering bird from which the infant Christ recoils, the scene heralding his eventual sacrifice on the Cross. It is displayed alongside Viola’s “The Messenger” (1996), which uses the metaphor of water to depict the eternal cycle of birth, life and death. The theme is further explored in drawings relating to the Virgin and Child, as well as the “Lamentation” (c. 1540), which is facing Viola’s “Nantes Triptych” (1992), three screens that individually portray a woman giving birth, a figure floating in a mysterious half-light, and Viola’s own mother on her deathbed.  The exhibition continues with a series of installations by Viola that reflect on the nature of human experience, as one set by moral and ethical choices, besieged by fears and ultimately experienced in solitude. At the centre of the exhibition is Michelangelo’s “Presentation Drawings” (1530), which he produced as gifts for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, a young Roman nobleman for whom he developed a deep love. Demonstration pieces relating to the craft of drawing with chalk, they also explore complex myths and Neoplatonic concepts, and were created as expressions of devotion towards their recipient. These are shown in opposition to the quiet stillness of Viola’s “Man Searching for Immortality/Woman Searching for Eternity” (2013). Life-size images of an ageing man and woman are projected onto two black granite slabs, showing them slowly examining every inch of their naked bodies by torchlight, unable to hide from their earthly state. The final galleries include a series of works that more directly consider mortality and the possibility of rebirth. Among them are Michelangelo’s most poignant drawings, two Crucifixions from the final years of his life. and two of Viola’s monumental projections, “Fire Woman” (2005), and “Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Waterfall Under a Mountain)” (2005).

Info: Curators: Martin Clayton, Kira Perov, and Andrea Tarsia, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, Mayfair, London, Duration: 26/1-31/3/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-22:00, www.royalacademy.org.uk