Fabrizio Plessi (1940)
Italy


Biography :

"Fabrizio Plessi was born in 1940 in Reggio Emilia. In 1962 he finished his studies and began teaching drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. The artist began his experimental research linked to video and in 1975 he exhibited at the Palace of Diamonds in Ferrara. Three years later he participated in the Venice Biennale in the “Provoked Image” section. In 1980, still in Venice, he participated in the Cinema Festival. The dominant theme of Plessi's video installations is water, its flows and its movement, which become the metaphor, the symbol of a spiritual human condition. After the traveling exhibition Plessi: Water Video Project 1983-84, the artist returned to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, presenting the video installation Bronx, while Rome was the title of the work he presented that year. next at the Documenta in Kassel. In 1988 a major retrospective was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid. In 1990 he began teaching “Humanization of technologies” at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne, a chair he held until 2000. Still in Germany, in 1993, a vast retrospective was organized at the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund. The same year he participated in the XLVIth Venice Biennale with the video installation Liquid Crystals, presented in the café. In 1996 he created Baroque Cathodic Movements for the inauguration of the City of Sciences in Naples, a work also included in the vast personal exhibition of 1998 at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo in New York. The material presented at the Sao Paulo Biennale of Brazil of the same year is even more important, since it includes twelve installations. In 2000 he presented the Bronze-Bronx sculpture at the ArteFiera in Bologna and created a large installation entitled Sinking of Painting exhibited at the Palazzo d'Accursio. The definitive consecration came when he created for the Italian Government, in the pavilion of the World Expo in Hannover, Vertical Sea, which can be considered the most monumental technological sculpture ever built. The 44 meter high steel structure contains a gigantic luminous LED screen which simulates a constantly moving blue electric wave. On June 15, 2000, the sculpture created inside the Sony Center, designed by Renzo Piano, was inaugurated in Berlin on Potsdamer Platz. In 2001, after participating in the Cairo International Biennale, he presented at the Correr Museum in Venice a vast and unique exhibition of his most recent works on the theme of water and fire, accompanied by a gigantic installation on the Square Saint Mark made for the occasion. Major exhibitions will follow in the Guggenheim museums in Venice and Bilbao. In 2002 the Forest of Fire exhibition in the Quirinal Stables in Rome had a historical connotation: it was the first time that a living contemporary artist exhibited there."
(Source, website, Atelier Sulmare)

Works :
lien
Country