PROPEL
(12.09. - 25.10.2025) DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM proudly present PROPEL, Daniel Hölzl’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, opening during Berlin Art Week 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.
