Salman Toor: Someone Like You - The Courtauld Gallery - London
The Courtauld Gallery presents Someone Like You, the first solo exhibition in Europe of the acclaimed New York-based painter Salman Toor. Bringing together 19 of his most iconic, thought-provoking and at times humorous paintings, none of them shown in Britain before, the exhibition explores human connection and the desire, and the struggle, to belong, both culturally and emotionally.
Toor's scenes are fictional, yet they are rooted in his own experiences and memories. His figures share moments of friendship and love, but also of solitude and alienation. In the artist's words, the paintings "depict queer and immigrant lives that straddle different cultures and inhabit the tension between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement".
Born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1983 and trained in the United States, Toor lives and works in New York. His first institutional solo exhibition was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in 2024 he took part in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. This is his first solo museum show in Europe.
His practice is deeply rooted in the Old Masters, particularly Baroque and 18th-century painting. One of the key works on display, The Bar on East 13th (2019), revisits the Courtauld's celebrated A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Édouard Manet. A companion display of Toor's drawings in the Gilbert & Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery shows how drawing shapes his work as a painter. Go to Website
