Highlights in Venice Episode 2

11 December 2025

La Galleria · Venezia

Two weeks ago, we presented the first video from the Highlights in Venice series in our newsletter. In it, gallerist and art historian Dr. Dorothea van der Koelen selects individual works from the current exhibition Ways of Hope and presents them in more detail.

This week, we present Highlights in Venice– Episode 2. In this week’s video, Dr. Dorothea van der Koelen presents three more special masterpieces (by Fabrizio Plessi, Daniel Buren, and Turi Simeti), which you can see for yourself when you visit the exhibition until the end of the year, because: “It’s best to see the works in person.”

With this in mind, we send you our best regards and hope to welcome you personally to La Galleria Venezia before the end of the year.

Fabrizio Plessi’s Fabrizio sculptural work Mosaico d’oro, created just this year, draws on the ornate mosaics of the world-famous St. Mark’s Basilica – one of Venice’s most important cultural monuments. Plessi’s video works do not tell stories. Rather, the Venetian-by-choice uses the screen as a canvas for almost painterly variations. The mosaic depicted dances before our eyes as if we were viewing it through a gently moving surface of water.

Daniel Buren – the French master of minimalist art – is famous for his ‘stripe principle’, which he developed in the mid-1960s. It is always the same motif: an 8.7 cm wide white stripe that always runs vertically.

The work that is the focus today also features the famous stripes, but here they are less prominent. Buren’s window works (Cadre décadré) were created following the artist’s installation at the Guggenheim Museum in New York’s SoHo district and were presented in the exhibition of the same name at the Galerie van der Koelen in Mainz in 2006 and in Venice in 2007.

Buren likes to work in relation to architecture. The Cadre décadré works create such a spatial situation themselves by being installed at a distance from the wall.

Turi Simeti is one of the best-known representatives of the Italian Zero movement associated with Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni. He was one of around 30 artists whom Lucio Fontana – who had already broken new ground in the 1950s with his Concetti spaziali (spatial concepts) and turned the picture into a relief – introduced as the ‘Zero avant-garde’ in his studio in 1965.

Simeti’s characteristic oval form emerged as early as the beginning of the 1960s. From his first ordered relief paintings, initially arranged in geometric sequences, the basic oval module soon took on a life of its own in the airspace of the canvas-covered frame. The painting becomes a relief and enters into a relationship with the space.