Dittrich & Schlechtriem proudly present Propel, Daniel Hölzl’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, opening during Berlin Art Week on Thursday, September 11, 2025, 6–10 PM as part of Gallery Night and on view through October 25, 2025. The exhibition builds on the artist’s ongoing material and conceptual research into cycles of transformation, industrial memory, and the poetics of propulsion—extending the themes introduced in his 2022 solo exhibition Grounded.

Hölzl’s multidisciplinary practice is defined by a sensitive yet critical engagement with the systems and materials that shape modern life. Fusing sculptural engineering with ephemerality, he explores the entangled lifecycles of aviation, energy, and ecological consciousness.

At the core of Propel are three types of propellers—each a meditation on movement, innovation, collapse, and transformation—recalling the forms of both seed and bomb, origin and end.

The first, attached to a historic radial engine from a “candy bomber,” features deformed aluminum blades that graze the floor, suspended between flight and failure. Meanwhile, at the center of the gallery, three hollow carbon-fiber propellers spin overhead in a kinetic installation, releasing drops of pigment—black ink made from recycled air pollution—that arc through space, striking the walls and gradually forming a continuous line. The third group, cast in paraffin wax, was warped by sunlight and continues to shift with the ambient temperature, echoing the entropy of both technology and nature.

Accompanying the sculptures is a series of paintings of wilted flowers, rendered with melted wax and heat. Based on found photographs, these works translate botanical decay into scorched, fragile surfaces.

In linking nature, technological progress, and motifs of transience, Daniel Hölzl develops a contemporary form of poetic critique. In the propeller, past inventive spirit merges with the vision of a more environmentally friendly, electronic aviation technology of the future. His new works are not nostalgic machine fragments but markers of the present, reminding us that progress and finitude are inextricably intertwined, and that we live amid this very ambivalence.

The above is an excerpt from an essay on the exhibition by Madeleine Freund that will be published on our website prior to the opening.

Also during Berlin Art Week, Daniel Hölzl’s solo installation soft cycles is on view at Berlinische Galerie. And with support from Berlinische Galerie, Hölzl and Abie Franklin present a new site-specific installation titled Bycatch as part of the group exhibition Hallen 06 at Wilhelm Hallen (Kopenhagener Str. 60–68, Berlin), on view September 6–14, 2025.