SoiL Thornton

SoiL Thornton was born in 1990 in Macon, Georgia, in the United States. Thornton earned a BFA from The Cooper Union in New York in 2012 and built a practice that blurs painting and sculpture, working with found materials, collage, and readymade elements to make objects that move between wall and floor and, at times, into photography, video, and installation. Thornton is nonbinary and uses they and them pronouns.

Early recognition came with a 2016 solo exhibition, Sir Veil, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, followed by inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A run of European institutional solo shows followed, including Decomposition Evaluation at Kunstverein Bielefeld in 2022 and Choosing Suitor at Secession in Vienna in 2023. In 2020, the Bredin Prat Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris connected Thornton to its Prix Jean-Francois Prat program. Thornton now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and is represented by Maxwell Graham in New York and Morán Morán in Los Angeles.

In 2025 and 2026, Thornton's practice intersected directly with a personal housing dispute with a landlord. Press reporting describes a March 2026 court filing confirming that the landlord had discontinued the eviction proceeding. That episode became subject matter for Thornton's 2026 solo exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York, which examines the role an art institution can play amid a housing crisis.

Institutional writing on Thornton returns consistently to the blurred line between painting and sculpture, the use of found and altered materials, and a practice that crosses into photography, video, and installation. No verbatim critical assessment from a named critic at a major outlet could be confirmed for direct quotation here. The pattern of institutional support, a 2016 museum solo debut, the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and a run of European Kunstverein and Kunsthalle solo exhibitions through 2022 and 2023, points to a critical and curatorial consensus that Thornton's hybrid objects merit sustained attention.

Thornton's market is small and largely undocumented at public auction. The only confirmed sale identified in current research is So Warm Out, That's A Lot Of Sea Weed Chips, which sold for GBP 22,680 at Phillips London on 16 April 2021 in a 20th Century and Contemporary Art Day Sale. No higher or more recent public sale has been identified, though the market databases checked were not exhaustive, so this should be read as the highest confirmed result rather than a verified all-time record. Museum acquisition has moved faster than the auction market: the work is held in at least ten institutional collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Thornton's market is early stage: a single confirmed public sale, no catalogue raisonne, and verification that runs through the artist's representing galleries rather than an estate or foundation archive. The strongest signal for a collector is the pace of museum collecting, ten institutions to date, and continued institutional programming through 2026, rather than any auction price history, which remains too limited to establish a reliable trend. Buyers researching provenance or prior sales should also check records filed under the earlier professional name, Torey Thornton.