Salman Toor

Provides new insight into Salman Toor’s iconic, thought-provoking yet humorous paintings, which explore human interactions and the desire to belong.

Salman Toor (b. 1983) is well-known for his vibrant paintings that represent people in shared moments of friendship and love, as well as experiencing solitude and alienation. The characters that populate Toor’s painting are fictional but rooted in personal experiences and memories. Toor says that his paintings ‘depict queer and immigrant lives that straddle different cultures and inhabit the tension between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement. What it means to find a community, but also the daily costs associated with visibility.’

Salman Toor: Someone Like You provides new insight into Salman Toor’s paintings and also addresses the artist’s manifold references and illuminates the crucial role that drawing plays in his practice as a painter.

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1983, Toor trained in the United States. He currently lives and works in New York. He has had major exhibitions internationally, including his acclaimed first institutional solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2020-21). The Courtauld’s exhibition will be Toor’s first solo museum show in Europe.

Richard Meyer is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History, Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University, California.

Aziz Sohail is a curator and writer, currently a PhD Candidate in Curatorial Practice and Teaching Fellow with the Department of Fine Art, Monash University, Melbourne.

Elena Crippa is Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at The Courtauld, London.