Salman Toor Paints the Highs and Lows of Queer Nightlife at London’s Courtauld Gallery
‘Someone Like You,’ his first show in Europe, gathers 19 of his greatest hits in a luminous portrait of immigrant life and the desire to belong.
Summary
New York-based Pakistani-American artist unveils his first European solo at Courtauld Gallery in London, open until January 10, 2027
The exhibition comprises 19 paintings focused on human connection and belonging, seen through his queer, brown protagonists
Making his European debut, Pakistani-American painter Salman Toor lands in London for Someone Like You, his new solo exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery. Featuring 19 of his most iconic works, the presentation gives Britain a deservedly momentous introduction to Toor, who the New York Times dubbed “one of the most fascinating painters of his generation.”
For the past decade, the New York-based artist has been redrawing narratives around immigration, desire, and power, placing queer brown men at the center of their own stories. Though the characters are fictional, Toor roots them in his own memories, imbuing them with a diaristic intimacy.
But the works are more than odes to queer joy. They “inhabit the tension between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement,” he said. “What it means to find a community, but also the daily costs associated with visibility”. Just as quickly as we succumb to the buzz of Toor’s sumptuously painted club scenes, so lively you can almost hear it, we retreat, with his protagonists, into quieter vignettes of alienation and estrangement. Toor manages a mastery of both the thrills of a night out and its aftermath, awake in the loneliest hours of the night.
Zeroing in on human connection through hazy figures, distinctly their own while bleeding into one another. More than they are glamorous, they’re real, caught between the desire to belong while still trying to understand how to feel at home.
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Someone Like You is now on view in London until January 10, 2027.
Courtauld Gallery
Somerset House, Strand,
London, WC2R 0RN
