The Courtauld in London presents the first solo museum exhibition by celebrated New York-based painter Salman Toor, bringing together 19 significant works that explore friendship, love, solitude and the complex search for belonging.
Born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1983, and now based in New York, Toor creates fictional scenes rooted in his own memories and experiences. His paintings portray queer and immigrant lives navigating multiple cultural identities, often capturing the tension between intimacy and exposure, belonging and alienation.
Across the exhibition, Toor’s figures are shown sharing moments of connection and affection, as well as experiencing isolation and uncertainty. The works are often intimate and humorous, while also addressing the everyday realities of visibility and the desire to find community.
Reflecting on his practice, Toor describes his paintings as depictions of “queer and immigrant lives that straddle different cultures,” exploring both the comfort of community and the challenges that come with being visible within it.
Toor trained in the United States and has exhibited internationally. His major presentations include his acclaimed first institutional solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2020–21 and his participation in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2024.
The exhibition also highlights Toor’s longstanding engagement with European art history. Deeply influenced by the Old Masters, particularly Baroque and 18th-century painting, the artist draws on historical visual languages while addressing contemporary experiences of identity, migration and desire.
One of the exhibition’s central works, The Bar on East 13th (2019), directly revisits Édouard Manet’s celebrated A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), part of The Courtauld’s collection. Through this dialogue between past and present, Toor places contemporary queer and immigrant experiences within a broader history of Western painting.
The Courtauld exhibition marks an important milestone in Toor’s career, bringing his distinctive visual language of intimacy, memory and cultural hybridity to a European museum audience for the first time.
Featurin Image Courtesy: Courtauld Institute of Art
Minerva is a visual artist and currently serves as a sub editor at Abir Pothi.
