From 8 May 2025 to 4 Nov 2025
Natura Morta, Jago’s New Work at the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan
Milano – Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana
From May 8 to November 4, 2025, Jago’s new and previously unseen work Natura Morta will be the centerpiece of a major exhibition at the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.
In a continuous dialogue between past and present, Jago openly engages with Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit, one of the most iconic masterpieces in the museum’s collection, through a work that transforms the language of tradition into a raw and contemporary reflection: a basket filled not with fruit, but with weapons. Pistols, rifles, and machine guns are piled into the basket, symbolizing a “nature” now tainted by violence and the seriality of human production.
The exhibition, which will also feature the publication of a catalog produced in collaboration with Arthemisia and published by Moebius, stems from an in-depth exploration of the very concept of fragility. In Caravaggio’s painting, the beauty of ripe fruit becomes a metaphor for the passage of time and the transience of life; Jago pushes this reflection further, revealing what now fills our lives: objects designed to kill, mass-produced, stripped of meaning—yet terrifyingly real.
The choice of marble, a noble material rooted in tradition, is an integral part of the message: an eternal medium used to express a wound of the present—a sculptural gesture that echoes the history of Italian art, yet simultaneously breaks away from it to denounce a world where death has become a consumer product.
The installation enters into an ideal dialogue with Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit, staging a visual and conceptual confrontation between two still lifes—each telling the story of a different era, yet bound by the same question: what remains of life when time and mankind consume it?
From 8 May 2025 to 4 Nov 2025
Milano – Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana