Feb 18

Feb 18 FEUERSTÜHLE by Michael Gaedt and Eric Scaggiante

There is a particular kind of person who spends forty years adding engines to wheelbarrows, not because anyone asked, not because it makes practical sense, but because the alternative, doing nothing, was never a real option. Michael Gaedt is that person.

FEUERSTÜHLE gathers a collection of his motorized objects, bumper cars, wheelbarrows, mechanical horses, alongside photographic work by Italian photographer Eric Scaggiante, whose images document these creations in and around Gaedt's Stuttgart studio with the kind of attention usually reserved for portraiture. Which, in a way, is exactly what they are.

Gaedt built these objects over the course of more than four decades, and for much of that time they served a specific purpose: props for Die Kleine Tierschau, the band he co-founded and performed with across over 4,500 shows between 1981 and 2016. Inside the exhibition space at Galleria Montegani, they are recontextualized, removed from the stage, placed within walls, asked to hold meaning in stillness rather than spectacle.

Scaggiante's photographs resist easy classification. They carry the precision of documentary work and the mood of something stranger, capturing both the rawness of the machinery and the logic, odd, consistent, entirely its own, that produced it. He traveled to Stuttgart after learning, through a mutual friend, who Gaedt actually was. What he found there, he has said, was a man whose personality preceded any label one might try to place on it.

The show opens on 6 February 2026 and concludes on 24 February with a finissage concert in which Gaedt will start the engines again, returning the objects to the condition they were built for.

eBay finds and junkyard parts, lovingly assembled, definitively unmissable. FEUERSTÜHLE is on view at Galleria Montegani throughout February 2026.

This is the most impressive exhibition I’ve seen recently. It’s an incredible fusion of music and photography, all anchored by the raw energy of racing and live performance. Truly looking forward to the finissage on the 24th.