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Lonnie Holley
Art Basel: Booth P03 -
Edel Assanti is delighted to present two solo presentations by renowned American artist Lonnie Holley across the Premiere and Unlimited sectors at Art Basel 2025.
Edel Assanti's booth in the Premiere section comprises an interconnected group of sculptures, paintings and assemblages produced by Holley within the past five years, addressing themes of social justice and ancestral memory. -
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“The huge hose becomes simultaneously a constricting snake and a life-saving thread. Other artists have teased out the history of abandoned objects, the hidden stories of stuff. But few have captured the knife-edges between tool and trash, hope and fear, life-giving and life-taking. Holley treats remains with the respect they deserve.”
- Joe Lloyd, Studio International
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“It is that the cultural and the cosmic, the domestic and the political, all merge, and find unique expression, in Lonnie Holley’s wildly associative, deeply attentive imagination.”
- Sean O’Hagan, The Observer
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“The work felt like a kind of memorial device, one both ancient and modern, the artist tuning into the murmuring frequencies of abandoned objects.”
- Daniel Culpan, Artforum
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Lonnie Holley has been making art since 1979, devoted to a practice of improvisational creativity that spans painting, sculpture, filmmaking and music. Adapting found materials, Holley's works relay histories that are both autobiographical and collective. His oeuvre tackles universal topics such as humanity's precarious relationships to the natural world and technology, alongside specifically American and personal histories, encompassing the residual effects of the Jim Crow era, the triumphs of the Civil Rights movement, and the ongoing struggles with false narratives around class mobility and race.
Lonnie Holley (b. Birmingham, AL, 1950) lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2024, Holley's work was the subject of a solo show at Camden Art Centre, London, UK. His work has recently been exhibited at the International African American Museum, Charleston, USA (2024); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (2024); Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, USA (2023); the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2023); Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, USA (2022); National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C, USA (2022); The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, USA (2021); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2020); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA (2020); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA (2018); MASS MoCA, North Adams, USA (2017); de Young Museum, San Francisco, USA (2017); among many others. His work is in the permanent collections of many museums, including the International African American Museum, Charleston, SC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Holley's first film, I Snuck Off the Slave Ship, (2019), premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2019. In 2023, he received lifetime achievement awards from the American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY, USA, and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Maine, ME, USA. Holley is signed to Jagjaguwar, and lives and works in Atlanta, GA, USA.
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