‘This painting makes me so happy,’ said my usually gallery-averse friend, pulling me over to Salman Toor’s ‘The Women’, on display in the painter’s first solo museum show in Europe, at the Courtauld Gallery. ‘We’ve had so many Sunday mornings like this.’
In the painting in front of us were three women slumped across a bed, each propping her head up with one arm. In our version, we’d probably be debriefing on the events of the night before. The painting is small, the room cosy and cocooned from the outside world in Toor’s characteristic velvety green, laid down in thick, parallel strokes of oil paint. At the dresser stands a boy. Toor has said that if he were to write a collection of stories, this image would be the first: ‘a coming-of-age moment for the boy experiencing a blossoming sense of self.’
Toor was born in Lahore, Pakistan, into a middle-class Muslim family. At 20, he moved to the US to study painting, and eventually settled in New York. It was there that he began painting the world that now fills his canvases: queer South Asian men drinking, dancing, flirting, scrolling, lying around with friends, falling in love and being alone. His figures aren’t portraits of real people, but they come from a world he knows. They occupy the sometimes uncomfortable territories between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement. His work draws as much from the Old Masters and the traditions of Western painting as it does from the art history of Pakistan and South Asia, folding those references into scenes of contemporary queer life. His paintings place brown boys at the centre of the frame, affording them the same weight and importance that Rubens and Van Dyck, and all those old white men bestowed on their protagonists centuries ago.
He can do everything. And yet, whatever he does, you know it’s him
What’s cool about the show being here is that one of Toor’s best-known paintings has a history with the Courtauld already. ‘The Bar on East 13th’ (2019) was painted after a visit in 2017, when Toor encountered Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère’ (1882). ‘It helped me paint my way into finding a community in New York City; it was also like coming out through painting,’ he has said. And now, for the next three months, the two paintings hang just a room apart.
And then you’ve got the enormous ‘Ghost Ball’ (2023), on loan from the Pinault Collection, a composition inspired by an Indian miniature of a group of dancers. Each figure seems wrapped up in their own moment while still somehow moving as one. ‘Lunch’ (2019) is a gorgeous circular painting that nods to the roundels of the Italian Renaissance, where Toor’s fascination with light lands on the decidedly un-Renaissance glow of a phone screen. Then there’s ‘Cross Street’ (2025), his first foray into purple, with flashes of olive, yellow and emerald cutting through the mauve and exaggerated figures that bulge with cartoonish energy. And ‘Bar Boy’ (2019) is perhaps the best distillation of what Toor is doing in his work: navigating culture, finding community, searching for belonging, and the strange way collective joy and loneliness can coexist in a city that you’re still learning to call home.
Across the show, the works come in varying scales, shapes, subjects, colours (albeit mainly green). He can do everything. And yet, whatever he does, you know it’s him. Great artists tend to do that, so it’s no wonder Toor has become one of the most sought-after painters of his generation, his paintings fought over by major public and private collections around the world.
Before we went, a young artist I admire posted a picture of the show on Instagram with the caption: ‘Salman Toor is one of those painters who makes you want to be a better painter.’ I’d add that even if you’ve never picked up a paintbrush, he makes you wish you could. And, failing that, he’ll make even the most gallery-averse among us feel like it was worth getting out of bed on a Sunday morning to spend an hour or two getting lost in his vivid, incisive scenes.
