SALMAN TOOR

"The Devotees", 2024

Charcoal and gouache on paper

12 x 9 inches (30.5 x 22.9 cm)

Courtesy of the Artist and Luhring Augustine, New York © Salman Toor

Selected by Christopher Y. Lew 

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. 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. 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. His work is currently on view in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, through November 24, 2024. Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work organized by and originally presented at the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD in 2022, and accompanied by a catalogue, later traveled to the Tampa Museum of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2023-2024).