London’s Courtauld Gallery (The Courtauld) presents the first European solo exhibition of artist Salman Toor. Acclaimed for paintings that capture contemporary experience and urban life with arresting force, Toor brings together his most iconic, thought-provoking and at times wryly humorous canvases — none of which have previously been shown in the UK. The exhibition is curated by Dr Elena Crippa, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld.

Nineteen paintings made since 2019

Born in 1983 in Lahore, Pakistan, Salman Toor now lives and works in New York. His paintings seize moments of friendship and love as well as loneliness and estrangement. The Courtauld’s show presents nineteen paintings all made after 2019, focusing on Toor’s exploration of human interaction and the desire for — and struggle to feel — belonging across cultural and emotional registers. The exhibition also features Toor’s drawings in the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery.

Although the figures and scenes Toor depicts are invented, they are rooted in his own experience and memory. Speaking about his work, he says the paintings portray queer and migrant life across cultures, dwelling in the tension between intimacy and exposure, belonging and alienation — what it means to find community, and the daily cost of visibility.

From Dutch taverns to Manet: an appropriated art history

His paintings offer an intimate view of the imagined life of young, queer South Asian men in New York — the city where he has spent most of his adult life — a tender, sensual rendering of cosmopolitan urban living. Evocative colour schemes and references to art history lend a fantastical quality to his narratives.

The Bar on 13th Street (2019) depicts a bartender with braided hair, a gold bangle, painted nails and a ribbon — its sources strikingly mixed: from the shadowy scenes of seventeenth-century Dutch tavern painting to a more direct quotation of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, which itself belongs to the Courtauld’s own collection. In Bar Boy (2019), the picture evokes the nightlife of New York’s East Village, a young man’s face lit by a smartphone, isolated and distracted inside a noisy club.

The border-control series: encounters at the margins

Another theme is a series Toor began in 2019 that addresses migrants’ experiences at border controls. Shaped by his own biography, these works depict the encounters of marginalised individuals as they cross borders, and their sense of freedom or constraint.

This series returns "the border" from an abstract political topic to a concrete bodily experience: waiting, being scrutinised, being asked to prove oneself. For contemporary painting, Toor’s significance lies in showing that figurative painting can still address the most urgent questions of identity, migration and desire without turning to conceptualised expression. SEEEEART will continue to follow contemporary painting exhibitions at international galleries and museums.