Presented during Berlin Art Week at Dittrich & Schlechtriem, PROPEL (September 11 – October 25, 2025) elevates Daniel Hölzl’s exploration of industrial memory, cycles of transformation, and the poetics of propulsion to a new threshold. Blending engineering with sculpture and technology with ephemerality, the artist constructs a life cycle that navigates aviation, energy, and ecological consciousness, placing the allure of progress alongside the shadow of finitude in the same space. The exhibition’s backbone consists of three distinct propeller groups: deformed aluminum blades, tethered to a historic “candy bomber” radial engine, scraping the ground and suspended between “flight and failure”; hollow carbon-fiber propellers spinning overhead in the gallery’s center; and paraffin casts that morph under heat. The carbon-fiber setup disperses black ink droplets—made from recycled air pollution—across the space, forming continuous linear traces on the walls over time, embodying the invisible physics of propulsion in sooty black lines. The paraffin propellers bend and warp with sunlight and ambient temperature, echoing nature’s entropy in the fatigue of technology, hinting at the shared silhouettes of seed and bomb, beginning and end. Hölzl’s accompanying paintings reimagine faded flowers in melted wax and heat-scorched fragile surfaces, with botanical decay mirroring industrial aging. This arrangement proposes a machine archaeology unmoored from nostalgia: the inventive spirit of the past converges with the tension of today’s greener electronic aviation aspirations. PROPEL recalls the inseparable bond between progress and mortality, weaving the poetry of speed into the fragility of materials. During Berlin Art Week, Hölzl’s solo installation soft cycles is also on view at Berlinische Galerie, and he presents Bycatch, a new site-specific work with Abie Franklin, at the group exhibition HALLEN 06 at Wilhelm Hallen (September 6–14, 2025). This second solo show at Dittrich & Schlechtriem expands the line opened in Hölzl’s 2022 GROUNDED, making visible the ambivalence of today—hope and exhaustion’s delicate interplay—through the cyclical motion of propellers.
📍Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Berlin
📅 September 11 – October 25, 2025
⏰ Tuesday–Saturday, 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM
