Sylvia Kouvali is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Grant Mooney at Paris Internationale Milano. Born in Seattle in 1990 and currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Mooney develops sculptural work that approaches material not as fixed entities but as relational configurations, one which is shaped by contact, context, and exchange.

Working with precious metals and industrial materials such as silver, steel and calcium carbonate, Mooney employs techniques of fabrication, joining, soldering, electroplating and sealing to produce abstract forms whose presence emerges through their negotiation with space and environment. His sculptures privilege tactility and connectivity, making visible the layered histories and interdependencies embedded within materials and processes.

Operating between autonomous abstraction and site-responsive installation, Mooney’s practice explores how objects, spaces, and bodies exist in continuous dialogue with their surroundings. His recent project Sphere Music presented at Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2025, extended this inquiry, examining how material structures can register, transmit, and quietly reflect atmospheric, bodily, and environmental forces. Mooney embraces a language of flux and flow; cellular and planetary, perceptible and imperceptible, rendering subtle currents tangible through sculptural form.

Included in this presentation are a series of wall based works produced between 2020 - 2024, which highlight Mooney’s relationship to jewellery making and hand-fabrication techniques, including a specialised jewellers vice and rare earth metals such as neodymium, illustrating his deep understanding of material and their varied states. Materials are often supported or held in place and there is an interdependence across all. Here Mooney investigates their structural capacities and latent potentials, as well as the effects of time, temperature, and proximity.

Outlet (c.) ii, 2024 is a glass sculpture modelled after a float valve, a device used to regulate water levels through continuous measurement and adjustment. Created in collaboration with glass artist Nicholas Phillips, the work draws on both glassblowing traditions and the formal language of scientific vessels. In making the work, molten glass was blown directly into a stainless-steel water bowl and then shaped reductively to create an open, calibrated form. As a result, the piece carries a strong sense of volume and containment.

In Untitled (c. ii salento), 2023, Mooney turns to wax and sap, materials drawn from nature, often depleted through extraction, reflecting on their fragility and symbolic resonance. The resulting composition, evoking both offering and sacrifice, meditates on vulnerability, transformation, and care.

The earliest work here, Eutectic c. (i), 2020, engages material, space, and the body through attachments that interact with architectural features such as columns, thresholds, and edges. Drawing from jewellery and metalsmithing, Mooney joins silver and bronze alloys with heat, holding them in tension with insulated materials. For Mooney, tools, ornamentation, and fabrication extend the body, shaping how viewers move through and experience the work. Making is framed as a relational act, where bodily knowledge, industry, and intimacy converge. The inclusion of cast mistletoe introduces a material tied to nearness and ritualized closeness, allowing Mooney to embed relational contexts within industrial modes of fabrication and exchange.

In works such as Cation c. (ii) and Cation c. (iii), both 2024, an electroplated steel shell frames a silver interior plate that folds in on itself, as if charged by an invisible pinch. Drawing on Mooney’s background as a jeweller, these pieces recall cuttlebone casting techniques, in which the imprint of a cephalopod’s carbonite shell is used to form a mould.

The presentation follows major exhibitions of Mooney’s work at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig and Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco. Mooney has also been included in group exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2022), the ICA, Los Angeles (2021), Yale Union, Portland (2020), Stadtgalerie Bern (2020), Sculpture Center, New York (2020), Fondation D’entreprise Ricard, Paris (2017), Kunst-Werke Berlin (2017).

His work was also included in the Whitney Biennial 2024 and is held in important museum collections including Collezione di Arte Contemporanea, Città di Parabita, Lecce, Italy; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco, CA and UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley, CA