Salman Toor

Salman Toor’s resplendent and thoughtful figurative paintings depict intimate moments of the everyday in the lives of fictional young, queer men of color engulfed in contemporary cosmopolitan culture from the East and West. Vibrant, imaginative interior scenes with painterly execution foreground his highly acclaimed oeuvre, where figures are freed from the impositions placed upon them by the outside world. Toor often reinvents art historical compositions with remarkable interpretation, rendering scenes with deep, earthy colors and expressive brushstrokes. In depicting the mundane and the memorable moments of his characters’ lives, Toor reveals a profoundly relatable existence, producing an opportunity for empathy through the language of painting.

Toor was born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1983 and currently lives and works in New York. He studied painting and drawing at Ohio Wesleyan University and received his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Toor rose to fame after his important 2020 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York. Viewers immediately attached themselves to Toor’s evocative paintings chronicling the experiences of Brown queer men often interacting with technology in a tongue-in-cheek display. Toor’s paintings present an unapologetic view of the queer community, bringing comfort to the artist’s own experience as a queer man from a Muslim cultural background. Toor’s visual accomplishments have afforded him a recent solo presentation at M WOOD, Beijing, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Toor is additionally the recipient of a 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and his work is in the permanent collections of the Tate, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson; RISD Museum, Providence; and Wake Forest University Art Collection, Winston-Salem. Toor is exclusively represented by Luhring Augustine.