There may be no venue more fitting for Salman Toor’s first European solo show than the Courtauld Gallery. Among his best-known paintings is The Bar on 13th St (2019), an absinthe-green retort to Édouard Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), with Toor’s update of the Impressionist masterpiece casting a stylish androgyne as the barmaid. The two paintings hang under the same roof during Someone Like You, which surveys the past seven years of the Lahore-born, New York-based artist’s career.
The exhibition begins in 2019, a pivotal year for Toor, says the show’s curator Elena Crippa. This was when he began more explicitly depicting his personal experiences and identity, particularly his queer sexuality. The artist terms paintings such as Bar Boy (2019) as his “coming out pictures”.
Toor’s is a highly recognisable style: genre paintings in which queer brown men are the default. Gangly and camp, they are affectionately caricatured and rendered with dextrous, sketch-like brushstrokes. The 19 paintings included in the show fall into two categories: crowded and convivial—in Three Men in a Taxi (2021) the viewer is squeezed into the back seat of a cab alongside three friends as they speed across a city—or lonely and fraught—Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug (2019) details the tense experience of US border control as a Pakistani person after 11 September 2001. Sometimes they are both: Twilight Story (2023), an imaginary composition drawing from Toor’s childhood home in Lahore, feels nostalgic and ominous at once, evoking the tension of growing up queer and effeminate in Pakistan.
Narrative impulse
The exhibition underscores Toor’s deep anchoring in the Western Old Masters. For the show he has made a new commission, Fag Puddle with Carriers (2026), modelled on Lorenzo Lotto’s The Entombment (1550-55), also in the Courtauld’s collection. But if there is an art history the exhibition hopes to place Toor within it is the 2010s revival of narrative painting, joining “Nicole Eisenman and Kerry James Marshall”, Crippa says. (Toor has also cited John Currin and Hernan Bas as such antecedents.)
Telling vulnerable stories through stylish, painterly images has found Toor a rapturous audience. Since a breakout 2020 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, his art market has skyrocketed, and he received a significant presentation in the main exhibition of the 2024 Venice Biennale.
The Courtauld show wants to demonstrate that 42-year-old Toor is continuing to experiment in his practice despite this early success. Crippa notes that as Toor progresses, his wrist is “gradually loosening” (or should that be limpening?). “Toor describes this as distancing himself from the canvas, he holds the brush from the end of the handle, and the way in which he outlines and caresses his subjects becomes more abstract.”
Indeed, in later works such as The Joke (2024), a disquieting image of diners in an upscale restaurant, not only do strokes loosen, but proportions skew, dimensions collapse and figures appear as spectres, in a manner that returns to Toor’s mid 2010s work (not included in the show), where comparisons to George Grosz are more apparent. These later works, Crippa says, “are increasingly not reliant on preparatory drawings”.
Drawings are nonetheless a key part of Toor’s practice, and the show devotes an entire room downstairs to them. Some function as preparatory sketches, while others appear diaristic. In a small artist’s sketchbook, a nude male is shown on all fours from behind, captured in tight pen strokes that confirm the prodigious precision of Toor’s hand.
According to Crippa, Toor felt his breakout Whitney show might have leaned too heavily on the themes of joyous communion, and she hopes the Courtauld exhibition conveys a wider range of emotions. Certainly, this is achieved in works from his Fag Puddles series, which places items from Toor’s past in teetering compositions. As Toor explains in a catalogue essay, the fag puddle is a collection of “sissy things that I really like and… [was] made to feel ashamed of when I was growing up”. If Toor’s 2010s era was about coming out, it seems the next chapter may be drawing inwards to uncover latent wounds, positioning him not only as painter of gay sociality, but also psychodrama.
• Salman Toor: Someone Like You, Courtauld Gallery, until 10 January 2027
