Grant Mooney’s “sum”

Grant Mooney’s latest exhibition is more than the sum of its parts. It is, among other things, about the “sum” as in cogito ergo: an expanded manifestation about being, thinking, and making, minus the ego. In order to achieve this, the artist has turned Hans Hollein’s iconic building into a permeable machine, implementing porous borders between outside and inside, recent history and present, matter and perception.

From the outside, the Museum Abteiberg is a postmodern siege castle clad in dark titanium-zinc panels that form fortifying palisades, with a central sandstone cube rising up like the powerhouse of artistic experimentation it is. In its previous incarnation as the Mönchengladbach City Museum, before it moved into the Hollein building and became Abteiberg in 1982, the institution hosted shows ranging from Joseph Beuys and Hanne Darboven to Marcel Broodthaers and Lawrence Weiner, most of whose works became part of the collection. Inside, an elegant cascade of spaces lures the viewer through.

It stands to reason that Mooney, in dialogue with curator Alke Heykes, has used this setting as prompt and proposition in this unorthodox mix of solo and group show, temporary exhibition and collection display. Part of the fun is watching Mooney avoid the pitfalls of this approach (either be overshadowed by greats, or look like you’re basking in their reflected glory) by creating a precarious, tense, and multifaceted equilibrium.

On the roof, a metal wind harp perches on an arched bridge spanning the building’s central transept. Conceived with Winona Sloane Odette, the antenna-like sphere music (2025) emits a warm humming sound even in a gentle breeze. Inside, the vaulted space is crossed by another bridge-like passageway, at the lower end of which a monitor converted the wind harp’s hum into red and yellow stripes, somewhere between a Rothko and a broken TV screen. The objects scattered on the floor like spilled marbles are in fact disposable ventilator filters stuck together into pairs and thus transformed from medical residue into a fragile constellation to be carefully navigated. This remnant—Fantasies Scatter (2023)—of Park McArthur’s titular exhibition at Abteiberg last year is one of many sympathetic tie-ins to the history of the institution.

Another is the incorporation of a small piece by Robert Morris almost literally to serve as a yardstick against which to measure Mooney’s own work. Scale With Hand (1964) is a luggage scale attached to a leaden panel, holding the negative plaster cast of a hand pointing left. Nearby, Mooney has placed parts from industrial ventilators: three aluminum blades stacked elegantly to form the thin slice of a circle, two more forming a slender X, and two fan motors lying in wait. One could think this were merely an allusion to Marcel Duchamp’s famous assertion, made to Constantin Brâncuși after an aviation show, that “Painting is finished. Who can do better than this propeller?” Instead of taking this as a conceptualist quip against manual craft per se, it seems to have inspired a plastic response spelled out in real space.

The key to reading a large space in which a dozen historical and contemporary pieces have been orchestrated may be one of the smallest pieces in it. Mooney’s Housing (c.) xi (2024) is a wall-mounted montage slash relief, with its elements arranged or interlocked as part of a metallic bouquet (Mooney’s training as a silversmith is most evident here): a copper-coated polyethylene sheet, folded to form a curve held in place by a thin metal clip, wraps around a vertical steel rail, on which sits a silver-plated steel rectangle crisscrossed with impressed lines, as if an absentminded titan had left his fingerprint there.

The arrangements within this small work appear to have been scaled up in the space to human form, and then to larger-than-human form. Olga Balema’s floor pieces (Untitled, 2014–25 and Untitled, 2025) consist of flat, transparent PVC-foil cushions filled with water in which unpredictable reactions between chemical elements are taking place. Given that the body is roughly 60 percent water, the dimensions and weight of the work suggest an uncanny physical presence and process. A large work by Hanne Darboven (Untitled, 1970), composed of Xeroxed sheets bearing rows of numbers, appears as a vertical framing of this horizontal physical presence, as if to express the tendency to translate the operations of the body into sets of data.

This mechanical translation is, in turn, retranslated into physical trace by Niloufar Emamifar’s wall piece. It bears witness to a piece of land on the southern Italian coast the legal status of which is, according to the exhibition brochure, unsettled. Is it a once-private proprietà abbandonata now state-owned, but still neglected? Or does it occupy an in-between, legally contested state? In any case, Emamifar has transferred its material surface—soil, asphalt, moss, pebbles, shards, and debris—onto her sculpture through a meticulous casting process, resulting in the fragmental mimesis of a plot of land bearing the marks of its unresolved status. In Beuys’s Aus dem Maschinenraum, Anhänger (From the Machine Room, Trailer, 1977), an oblong, open cardboard box is filled with a haphazard pile of margarine, supplemented by four roughly rolled-up pieces of felt—all of this displayed in a glass case, triggering a strange flicker of associations, from saintly relic to mummified remains to toxic waste. In this exhibition, the act of violence has an aftermath.

Many of the works in this exhibition slide between the tenderness and the brutality of materiality itself. The general spirit of “sum,” and Grant Mooney’s work more specifically, expresses a hardcore materialism. “Materialism” connotes Marx’s focus on how production, circulation, and consumption define our lives. Yet Mooney zeros in on something more metaphysical and aesthetic than Marxist orthodoxy—how lives and politics are imprinted back onto the very raw materials fed into this process. “Hardcore” is meant here in the sense of the late Henrike Naumann, in the spirit of hardcore gabber: an exuberant enthusiasm for a radically base yet aesthetically consistent mode of expression, a way to lose oneself trance-like in a physical process—“sum” without cogito ergo.1

Mooney’s Partials i, (Gain c.) (2024) is maybe the most hardcore: a distorted, scattered piece of bronze cast from a sectoral horn, the kind used in large sound systems, caked into an irregular block of plaster on the floor. It’s a messy affair: wires pierce the plaster like threads in a poorly stitched wound. While other pieces by Mooney exude a gentle sense of control, this one is like Wile E. Coyote’s cartoon head: miraculously intact but grotesquely scorched after one of his own bombs blew up in his face. Welcome to the present.