Fabrizio Plessi

Fabrizio Plessi was born in Reggio Emilia on 3 April 1940. He began art studies at the Liceo Artistico there before moving to Venice for the Accademia di Belle Arti, where he completed his diploma in 1962. Those Emilia-to-Venice years fixed two lifelong coordinates: a craftsman's respect for drawing and a fascination with a city built on water.

After graduating from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia (studies associated with teachers including Giuseppe Santomaso in Treccani's account), Plessi returned to the same institution as painting professor for many years. From the late 1980s he also taught in Cologne at the Kunsthochschule fur Medien, founding or shaping chairs titled Humanization of Technologies and Electronic Scenography, arguing that digital tools should serve poetry and memory rather than replace them.

Around 1968 water became the core of his research through installations, film, videotape and performance. The 1973 Milan exhibition Acquabiografico named that program. Landscape actions in the mid-1970s and Venice Film Festival works Liquid Movie and Underwater pushed electronic image into cinema and public space. The Centre Pompidou's 1982 survey marked a turn to video sculpture. Bronx at the 1986 Venice Biennale and Roma at Documenta 8 (1987) made him an international reference for video installation.

The 1990s and 2000s brought Guggenheim SoHo (1998), San Diego MCA, Expo 2000's Mare Verticale, Waterfire on the Museo Correr (2001), Gropius-Bau Traumwelt (2004), Kistefos Memory Motions (2005), and repeated Biennale returns including Mari Verticali (2011). He treated historic sites (Piazza San Marco, Valley of the Temples, Palazzo Te, La Fenice, Caracalla, Palazzo Reale) as partners, not backdrops.

Plessi made Venice his primary home, with a longtime residence and studio near Rialto / San Polo, and also lived and worked in Palma de Mallorca. He married Carla; they had two children, Rocco and Maria Sole. After his death the family circulated the phrase "Mai un giorno senza una linea," recalling his nightly drawing and note-taking habit. Intimate details of his final illness beyond pneumonia were kept private at the family's request.

Plessi described his art as an incessant quest for poetry, history and the soul of things, and himself as a singular alchemist joining iron, wood and marble to the iridescence of electronics. He repeatedly said water was ancestral and video was among the newest technologies, and that analogies between liquid surfaces and the screen mattered. Drawing remained non-negotiable: "Il disegno come il respiro e un fatto biologico."

Institutions from La Biennale to city government in Venice framed him as a pioneer who anticipated language shifts in contemporary art. The Plessi Museum on the A22, permanent works in Germany, and decades of catalogues deposited in the Biennale Historical Archive keep the work in public view. Younger artists inherit both a technical problem (hardware obsolescence of CRT-era pieces) and a poetic permission to fuse landscape, architecture and screens.

Documented distinctions include the international prize L'Immagine elettronica (1987), the "Citta di Milano" prize for Liquid Movie at the Venice Film Festival context (1980, per official bio), Guest of Honour roles such as the Cairo Biennale, and the Premio Pascali (2014). Major retrospectives at Guggenheim SoHo, Gropius-Bau, Scuderie del Quirinale and others functioned as career crowns. The Plessi Museum at the Brenner Pass is a rare motorway museum dedicated to a living artist's oeuvre at the time of opening.

Beyond museums he designed electronic scenographies for dance and opera (with Frederic Flamand and Michael Nyman) and for Pavarotti in Central Park. Collaborations with Dior, Louis Vuitton and other brands brought cascading water and gold video into store openings and fashion imagery. Pandemic-era L'Eta dell'Oro on the Correr facade became one of Venice's most photographed contemporary interventions.

No major personal scandal dominates the public record reviewed for this memorial. Critical discussion around his work focuses on conservation: video sculptures depend on specific monitors and playback systems that go out of production, forcing museums to decide what to preserve (image, hardware, or both). Brand collaborations occasionally prompted art-world debate about commerce versus autonomy; Plessi treated them as extensions of electronic scenography.

Plessi died on 23 August 2026 at the hospital in Dolo following pneumonia, aged 86. Venice mayor Simone Venturini announced public mourning the same day. Lying in state was held at Ca' Farsetti on 28 August; the funeral followed at Santo Stefano, with the coffin borne by gondola. Family members asked that the most intimate medical details remain private while affirming he called himself a man of light to the end.