About the Artist
Salman Toor’s sumptuous and insightful figurative paintings depict intimate, quotidian moments in the lives of imagined young, brown, queer men ensconced in contemporary cosmopolitan culture. His work oscillates between heartening and harrowing, seductive and poignant, inviting and eerie.
In many of his paintings, he creates subtly disarming depictions of familiar domestic environments in which often-marginalized bodies flourish in safety and comfort. In other pieces, Toor creates allegorical spaces of waiting, anticipation, and apprehension; border crossings into a world that may or may not be welcoming. Central to his work are the anxieties and the comedies of identity. In creating his figures, he employs and destabilizes specific tropes in order to reflect on the way difference is perceived by the self and by others. As Whitney curators Christopher Lew and Ambika Trasi have noted, Toor’s project is one that examines “vulnerability within contemporary public and private life and the notion of community in the context of queer, diasporic identity.” Furthermore, in depicting the mundane and the memorable moments of his characters’ lives, Toor reveals a deeply relatable existence, ultimately creating 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. A widely acclaimed two-part solo exhibition, Salman Toor: Wish Maker, was recently on view at Luhring Augustine Chelsea + Tribeca (June-July 2025). In 2022, Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work accompanied by catalogue was organized by and originally presented at the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD, and traveled to the Tampa Museum of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA in 2023-2024. A major solo presentation of Toor’s work was also presented at M WOODS in Beijing in Winter 2023; in association with the project, the Art Gallery of Western Australia produced a publication in fall 2024. Other notable solo projects include Salman Toor: How Will I Know, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2020-2021) and an image of his painting Music Room (2021) was featured on the Hayward Gallery Billboard, London in 2022.
Toor’s work was recently included in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa (2024). Other group exhibitions Le monde comme il va/ The World As It Goes, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, France; Effetto Notte: Day for Night: New American Realism, Aïshti Foundation at Palazzo Barberini, Rome, Italy; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art; Tampa Museum of Art; Speed Museum of Art, Louisville; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and projects that have featured Toor’s work include Masters at Frick Madison, New York, NY; Any Distance Between Us, RISD Museum, Providence, Painting, Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montréal, Canada; and Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, Living Histories: Queer Views and Old RI; and I will wear you in my heart of heart, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Relations: Diaspora and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL. Toor is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and his work is in the permanent collections of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Dallas Museum of Art; London; and Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; RISD Museum, Providence; Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; Wake Forest University Art Collection, Winston-Salem; Des Moines Art Center; Tate, London; Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Pinault Collection, Paris; Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Brazil; Courtauld Gallery, M WOODS, Beijing; Art Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, among others.
Portrait © Sawani Chaudhary
