Daniel Hölzl

Meet The Artist:

16 September 2026

Meet The Artist:

Daniel Hölzl

16 September 2026

Q: How would you describe your artistic practice to someone seeing your work for the first time?

A: My work is often site-specific, installation-based, and quite varied. There’s no fixed style or medium I always use. What does recur is my interest in materials and their cycles. I’m fascinated by how materials are used, transformed, and recycled by the systems they circulate in and the feelings we attach to them. I often work with recycled materials such as carbon fibre, paraffin wax, industrial fragments or parachute silk, and sometimes the works continue changing during an exhibition. Their nature is conceptual: questioning cyclical processes, change and temporality . I’m interested in the principle of transformation rather than a fixed theme. Ultimately, I want material, idea and space to interlock, while leaving enough room for the work to be experienced aesthetically and interpreted in different ways.

Q: Would you say that you’re not really recycling materials, but continuing their biographies?

A: Thank you, I think that’s a beautiful way of putting it. I often feel that we’re really only borrowing materials for a certain time. When I create new works from materials used in previous installations, part of the concept and the stories are carried over. The material doesn’t simply disappear; it changes form and takes something with it into the next work. With "soft cycles" at the museum Berlinische Galerie in 2025, for example, I took fragments from eight earlier inflatables and reassembled them into one new work. You can still see the windows, doorways, seams and scars from their previous lives. So the biography of the material becomes part of the new work. I find that freeing because it means the material gets another chance.

Q: What matters more to you in a found material — its physical properties or its history?

A: I don’t think I can or want to separate the two. Often a material first catches my eye because of its physical properties: how it melts, breaks, bends, reflects light or behaves under a certain pressure. But once I do more research, it's whole history slowly unravels. With paraffin, for example, I’m interested in its malleability and how quickly it can transform, but also in the fact that it comes from petroleum, carries millions of years of stored energy and, in my case, it previously (for a short time in between) existed as discarded church candles. Carbon fibre has a completely different physical behaviour, but it also carries the history of aviation and industrial production, while also being derived from petroleum. The most interesting point is where these qualities overlap.

"The material’s history influences how I see its physical properties, and vice versa."

Q: What role does the exhibition space play in your practice?

A: More than any other form of artistic practice, I appreciate creating installations for a specific space, and with already existing works I at least try to adapt them to their new location. For me, an installation is never only about the individual objects. There is a dynamic between the materials, the object, the architecture and the visitors. Both the space and the materials already bring their own histories, and I’m once again interested in finding where they overlap. A space can clearly change the meaning of a work. With my solo show GROUNDED in 2022, for example, I transferred the markings of a former Tempelhof runway into the gallery at 1:1 scale, so the history of the airport became physically embedded in the exhibition. It functioned so to say as common ground for everything else that happened during this exhibition.

Q: Why has aviation become such an important motif in your work?

A: Aviation brings together many of the contradictions I’m interested in. It stands for freedom, mobility and progress, but also for war, destruction and environmental impact. I’ve been fascinated and shocked by aviation since childhood, partly because both of my grandfathers were connected to it during the Second World War. Moving to Berlin and looking right onto the former Tempelhof Airport from my previous bedroom window, made that interest even more tangible, while underlining the temporality of it all. I became interested in the history of flight, but also in what happens to the materials behind it. Modern aircraft since the seventies rely heavily on composite materials such as carbon fibre, which makes them lighter and more efficient but also much harder to recycle. So aviation becomes a way for me to talk about technology, energy, failure and progress, while also looking at the material cycles and histories hidden behind the otherwise romanticized image of flight.

Q: Can art ever truly be sustainable if it still requires production, transportation, and energy?

A: I don’t think the goal can be to make art completely sustainable. The art world itself is part of the machinery we might want to question: exhibitions require materials, energy, transportation and often climate-controlled spaces. For me, it’s more about trying to do the best I can while being aware of the consequences of those choices. I consciously work with materials that already “performed” at least once and reuse them whenever possible, but I also know that recycling requires energy and that I can’t make my practice impact-free. I think it’s important to stay with these contradictions rather than trying to resolve them too easily. For me, sustainability means asking where materials come from, how long we use them, what happens afterwards, and what systems we are participating in—and remaining aware of the trouble that comes with all of this.

Q: Which places in Berlin continue to inspire you and draw you back?

A: Tempelhofer Feld is probably the most obvious one. As said, when I first started developing works for GROUNDED, I was living right next to the former airport. It became a kind of landmark that connected many of the things I was already thinking about: mobility, history, failure, architecture and the transformation of a place after its original function has ended. I always keep returning to architecture more generally. I’m fascinated by the contrast between hard, monumental, seemingly rigid buildings and the temporary, sculptures or soft inflatable structures I make in response to them. Places like Lobe Block and various exhibition spaces have become part of that research too. By working within and through these places, they themselves never remain completely fixed and neither could I.