There are exhibitions that display works, and there are exhibitions that tell stories of transformation. “NAR – Pomegranate & Shebeke,” the solo presentation by Italian contemporary artist and composer Von Mai (Francesco Maggio), which closed on 9 October 2026 at the Azerbaijan Haus in Stuttgart after nearly nine months on view, belonged decisively to the second category. What began in the deep of January as a dialogue between Italian artistic sensibility and Azerbaijani cultural memory ended in October as one of the most quietly significant cultural encounters between Italy, Germany and Azerbaijan in recent memory.
At the heart of the exhibition stand two images, each charged with centuries of meaning. The first is the pomegranate — nar in Azerbaijani — the fruit that in the Caucasus embodies abundance, fertility and the promise of rebirth, its crimson interior holding a universe of seeds like a compressed cosmos. The second is the shebeke, the intricate geometric lattice of traditional Azerbaijani stained-glass windows, assembled without a single nail, whose wooden filigree dissolves sunlight into fragments of colored contemplation.
Von Mai does not illustrate these symbols; he listens to them. And this is precisely where his unusual artistic biography becomes essential to understanding the work.
Von Mai (Francesco Maggio) is an Italian classical composer and contemporary visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores the relationships between music, philosophy, spirituality and digital creativity. Born in Poggiardo, in the deep south of Italy, Von Mai first built his career in contemporary classical composition before his research gradually migrated across the border between sound and image. That passage was never an abandonment but an act of translation — a metamorphosis, the concept that governs his entire poetics. For Von Mai, art is the continuous transformation of matter, memory and language into new forms of expression; nothing is destroyed, everything changes state.
In NAR, this philosophy takes the shape of works generated digitally and algorithmically, then completed through physical interventions with acrylic paint. The algorithm proposes; the human hand answers. The result is a body of work in which technology and手工 creativity — in the most literal sense — coexist in productive tension, producing surfaces that read as visual scores: compositions of light, rhythm and silence rendered in pigment rather than sound.
The pomegranate and the shebeke become, in his hands, a meditation on light, rebirth, spirituality and cultural identity — themes that resonate equally with the contemplative tradition of his native Mediterranean and the symbolic universe of the Caucasus.
Promoted by the Von Mai Foundation and held at the Azerbaijan Haus in Stuttgart, the exhibition carried a significance that exceeded its aesthetic ambitions. In an era when cultural diplomacy is often reduced to protocol, NAR demonstrated the more subtle power of artistic interpretation: the ability to take a nation’s most intimate symbols and render them legible, moving and meaningful to an international public.
Over nearly nine months, the exhibition drew considerable public interest and international appreciation, strengthening the cultural triangle that connects Italy, Germany and Azerbaijan. It offered proof that traditional heritage, when approached not as folklore but as living material for contemporary creation, can speak a universal language.
The story of NAR does not end with its closing. The Von Mai Foundation is currently developing a comprehensive art and philosophy catalogue dedicated to the exhibition, one that will explore the works alongside their cultural, symbolic and spiritual dimensions. And the horizon already holds a new chapter: an exhibition dedicated to the cultural heritage of Karabakh, conceived for Azerbaijan Haus Stuttgart and the City of Stuttgart.
For Von Mai, metamorphosis is not a theme but a method — and the closing of one exhibition, like the closing of one movement, is merely the breath before the next. His journey from music to visual art, and from Southern Italy to the heart of Europe, can be told in his own voice.
Photo credits: The Von Mai Foundation
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