In Salman Toor’s paintings, queer south Asian men hang out in bars, twerk at trippy gatherings and lose themselves in phone screens. Sometimes they huddle in the back of taxis or pillow-fight on beds. In one portrait, a brown man stares apprehensively while facing customs officials.
For the 43-year-old Pakistani American artist, it’s crucial that these figures take centre stage, after years of being demonised and erased. And everyone else is in the background.” Over the last decade, Toor has been helping to redraw the narratives around immigrants, desire, power and sex. His artwork – rich, figurative oil paintings that echo and subvert European old masters and Indian Mughal miniatures – has confirmed his status as an “international art star” (the New Yorker) and “one of the most fascinating painters of his generation” (the New York Times).
Solo museum exhibitions in New York, Baltimore and Beijing have earned universal praise, while in November 2022, his painting Four Friends sold for $1.2m at Sotheby’s. Time recently included him in its most influential art people list. Next month, London’s Courtauld Gallery presents Someone Like You, a greatest hits of Toor’s paintings and drawings that he selected with the curator Elena Crippa.
As it’s home to many of his favourite baroque and impressionist artists, he couldn’t be more thrilled. The Courtauld was one of the galleries he visited on his first trip to London from Pakistan. Dressed in black parachute trousers, a grey sleeveless T-shirt and chunky fashion trainers, Toor is friendly and eager to talk about his art, armed with a printout of images from the show.
Like the themes in his work, our conversation moves from pop culture (no, this show is “absolutely not named after an Adele song”) to global politics (he regularly questions his “westernisation”) to family relationships (good, but they’d like to see fewer “willies” in his paintings). As an art student, Toor searched for inspiration at the Courtauld during his many “obsessive” periods. He became particularly obsessed with Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.
In his 2019 painting The Bar on East 13th, Toor pays tribute to Manet’s masterpiece, relocating it to New York’s East Village, where hipster queer couples make out and a brown barman wearing nail polish and braided hair takes the place of the melancholy French barmaid and partying bourgeoisie. Looking at that image now, Toor has mixed feelings: “I had just come out through painting so it was exciting because I felt free. It was a time of well-deserved self-love.
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