Fabrizio Plessi Dies at 86: The Artist Whose Medium Went Out of Production

Fabrizio Plessi died on August 23, 2026, at the age of 86, in the hospital at Dolo outside Venice. He spent more than half a century making art out of television sets, a practice that leaves behind a problem oil paint never poses: the picture is a piece of hardware, and hardware goes out of production.

 
 

Plessi Died at Dolo, and La Biennale Announced It

La Biennale di Venezia announced the death. Its notice traces his relationship with the institution from the 35th Biennale Internazionale d’Arte of 1970, in a section called Proposte per una esposizione sperimentale, through to the 54th Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte of 2011 and Mari Verticali.

Treccani’s signed entry in the Enciclopedia Italiana, written by Alexandra Andresen, gives his birth as April 3, 1940, in Reggio Emilia.

Artribune reported that he died following pneumonia at the hospital in Dolo, and that the funeral will be held on Friday, August 28, at 3 p.m. at the church of Santo Stefano in Venice.

Fabrizio Plessi at the opening of LIQUID LABYRINTHS in Vienna, 9 April 2015. Photo: Franz Johann Morgenbesser, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.

He came to the monitor from painting. Andresen’s entry records that he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice under Giuseppe Santomaso, which is a training in Italian painting, not in electronics.

 

Fabrizio Plessi’s outdoor video installation Waterfire, the Plessi tower at the Landesgartenschau grounds in Kronach, Germany, photographed in September 2015 — the year its thirty Loewe cathode ray sets went dark. Photo: Tors, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany. Cropped.

 
 

The Kronach Tower Stood Dark for Seven Years

In the Bavarian town of Kronach stands a steel tower packed with screens: water running down one face, fire climbing the other. Neue Presse Coburg reports that it was inaugurated on June 21, 2002, that it carried thirty cathode ray television sets made by Loewe, and that it counts as the first permanently installed outdoor video sculpture in the world. The paper also records the name it goes by: Waterfire, the same title Plessi had given his Venice work the year before.

In 2015 the water stopped and the fire went out. The same paper reported in July 2019 that for the screens there was “schlicht keinen Ersatz mehr” — simply no replacement any more.

The tower was switched back on on June 21, 2022, twenty years to the day after its inauguration. The cathode ray tubes had been replaced with LED.

The Plessi-Turm at the entrance to the Landesgartenschaupark in Kronach, 2022, the year it was relit with LED. Photo: Namenloser Hobbyhistoriker, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.

The image survived. The material that made it did not. The thirty Loewe sets that produced the water and the fire between 2002 and 2015 are no longer in the work.

 

Venice Was Rebuilt Sooner

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s press release of June 9, 2003 describes Digital Fall as an electronic waterfall on a large LED color display inside a rectangular metal construction, made of weathered Cor-ten steel, LED displays and sound, and equipped with its own micro-climate control system. The release states that the work “is being donated to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation by the artist and by Stahlbau Pichler, which has also made possible the construction of the work,” and that from July 2003 it would stand in the museum’s entrance court at 704 Dorsoduro.

Kronach was built out of Loewe television sets and Venice out of a large LED display behind Cor-ten steel. Both had climate control; the screen technology was the difference.

Even Digital Fall did not remain technologically static: a Plessi chronology records a new version in black steel and plasma televisions at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in 2009. The sources reviewed here do not establish whether that change was driven by technical failure, conservation needs or artistic revision.

 
 

WaterFire on Piazza San Marco Belongs to 2001, Not 2000

LaPresse’s obituary places Waterfire in Piazza San Marco in 2000.

The Museo Correr’s own exhibition archive records the show as organized by the Musei Civici di Venezia and curated by Carl Haenlein, produced by Gruppo Euromobil with Enel as technological partner and Sony alongside it, with exhibition design by Daniela Ferretti and an imposing installation on the exterior facade of the Ala Napoleonica. Behind those windows sit the Correr’s picture galleries, which hold a large share of the civic collection of Venetian painting.

The exhibition catalogue, edited by Haenlein and published by Electa, dates the run June 7 to July 29, 2001. Exibart’s contemporaneous listing closed it a month earlier, on June 29, 2001. They agree about the year, and Artribune’s obituary gives 2001 as well.

There was also no Art Biennale in 2000 for the show to have belonged to. The 48th Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte ran in 1999 and the 49th from June 10 to November 4, 2001, and the Correr’s archive describes WaterFire as folded into the visual arts Biennale program. La Biennale’s notice attaches the year 2000 to a different work altogether: Mare Verticale, made for Expo 2000 in Hannover.

 

The Gold Came Back Nineteen Years Later

In 2020 Plessi returned to the same facade with L’Età dell’Oro, a cascade of gold running down the Correr’s windows onto Piazza San Marco. La Biennale’s notice names it among his late works. LaPresse describes that return as arriving “vent’anni dopo,” twenty years later, which follows from its own 2000 date and not from 2001.

 
 

Fourteen Biennale Appearances, or Nine?

Exibart’s obituary says Plessi was present at the Venice Biennale fourteen times. La Biennale’s memorial notice names nine occasions: the art exhibitions of 1970, 1972, 1978, 1984, 1986, 2005 and 2011, and two appearances at the Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica, Liquid Movie in 1981 and Underwater in 1982, both in the Officina Veneziana section.

Nine is what the notice names, not what it claims. It is demonstrably not a complete list: Treccani’s signed entry includes a 1995 Biennale the notice leaves out while dropping the 1978 it includes, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection places WaterFire “during the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001”, a year the notice’s list of art exhibitions omits. The figure fourteen is not Exibart’s alone: it appears in the City of Venice’s own condolence statement for Mayor Venturini — “Presente 14 volte alla Biennale di Venezia” — and in the wording Il Resto del Carlino, VeneziaToday and Il Nord Est carried.

 

1986 Was the Consecration, Not the Beginning

Sky TG24 wrote that “la consacrazione arrivò nel 1986, quando rappresentò l’Italia alla 42esima Biennale di Venezia con Bronx” — the consecration came in 1986, when he represented Italy at the 42nd Venice Biennale with Bronx. La Biennale’s notice places Bronx at the 42nd Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte of that year. Treccani dates the object itself to 1985: its shorter entry gives “Bronx (1985, Biennale di Venezia del 1986).”

What 1986 was not is a beginning. By the notice’s own account his first Biennale came sixteen years earlier, at the 35th in 1970. The latest edition it names is 2011, with Mari Verticali.

 
 

What the Record Now Shows

• WaterFire on Piazza San Marco dates to 2001, not 2000. Museo Correr’s archive, the Electa catalogue and contemporary reporting support a run ending July 29, 2001; Exibart’s June 29 date appears to be an outlier.
• Plessi’s relationship with the Venice Biennale began in 1970, sixteen years before Bronx. Fourteen is the longstanding biographical count used by the City of Venice and other published sources, while La Biennale’s current memorial notice names nine specific appearances rather than presenting nine as a career total.
• The Kronach Waterfire tower makes the conservation problem tangible. Its thirty Loewe cathode-ray televisions became impossible to replace, the work went dark in 2015, and it returned in 2022 only after the display technology had been changed to LED.

Plessi’s death therefore leaves more than a catalogue to preserve. His work forces museums and owners to decide which part of a video sculpture constitutes the artwork: the moving image, the physical technology that produced it, or the relationship between the two. Kronach shows that this question is no longer theoretical.