In 2004, the opera scene was taken by storm by the ground-breaking production of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde in Los Angeles. This book offers a behind-the-scenes look at how the visionary American artist Bill Viola created four hours of video as a visual complement to this profound psychological drama. It also tells the story of its commissioning by the then Paris Opera director Gerard Mortier, who pushed the boundaries of what opera could be by inviting a trinity of California-based creatives to re-imagine a Tristan und Isolde for our times. Having just opened the now iconic Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, this was a bold project for the Los Angeles Philharmonic to take on, but it was one which catapulted them into the world of music and breath-taking visuals. The fully staged opera that resulted has been seen in Paris, Toronto, Madrid, Tokyo, Kobe, and concert versions in LA, New York, Rotterdam, London, Helsinki, Stockholm, and St Petersburg, and the revolutionary four-hour video and visuals created by Bill Viola to accompany this opera lives on through this beautifully illustrated book. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

Bill Viola began producing video works in the early 1970s, and since then has captivated audiences with his poignant and beautifully wrought interpretations of human experience. He is today considered among the most celebrated proponents of the medium of video art. This is the first monograph to chart Viola's career in full, covering his education in New York, his earliest major films of mirages in the Sahara desert and of hospital medical imagery, his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York 1997 and his recent installations in Venice, New York, Tokyo, London and Berlin. Hanhardt outlines the key visual, literary and spiritual influences on Viola's work and his changing approach to the medium of film in response to technological advancement. Woven into the discussion are illustrations of Viola's most significant works, including Information (1973), The Passing, (1991), The Greeting (1995), Going Forth by Day (2002) and Martyrs, the 2014 film commissioned for St Paul's Cathedral in London, as well as reproductions of Viola's sketches and notebooks that bring his working process to life. Supplemented by a select chronology, bibliography and list of public collections, Bill Viola offers a rare and fascinating account of one of contemporary art's most powerful creative minds.

At first glance, there may appear to be more to separate Michelangelo (1475-1564) and Bill Viola (b. 1951) than to unite them: one, the great master of the Italian Renaissance; the other, the creator of state-of-the-art immersive sound and video installations. And yet, when Martin Clayton showed Viola Her Majesty The Queen's unsurpassed collection of Michelangelo drawings at Windsor in 2006, parallels began to emerge. This book presents a new perspective on both artists' works. Stills and sequences from ten key video pieces by Viola are reproduced alongside fourteen of Michelangelo's presentation drawings, as well as the Taddei Tondo, the only Michelangelo marble sculpture in the UK and a treasure of the Royal Academy's collection. Texts by Martin Clayton examine how existential concerns - the preoccupation of many Renaissance artists, not least Michelangelo - are explored in Viola's often profoundly moving video installations, while Kira Perov provides insight into Viola's working processes.