In his latest paintings, Salman Toor meditates on his life as a gay artist who divides his time between two diametrically opposite communities: New York, where he can live and love openly, and his hometown of Lahore, Pakistan, where the dictates of family and religion demand that he suppress his identity.
New York-based artist Salman Toor’s brushstrokes place young queer brown men in scenes of love, friendship, and solitude in his luscious oil paintings. In Time After Time, his ongoing exhibition at Aicon Gallery in Manhattan, he challenges the systematic exclusion of queer men of color from art history.
Salman Toor’s (b. 1983) works have ranged from meticulously executed 17th century-style genre painting to abstracted figuration employing design elements and visual language from both Eastern and Western pop culture. Toor’s work deals with the issue of identity
Salman Toor is the best kind of contemporary painter: funny, insightful, and not afraid to get personal. His colorful, figurative images are both intimate and relatable, featuring crowds of people engaging in romantic or imaginative adventures, filled with references to the artist’s many travels and international background.
Salman Toor’s insular scenes of life in Pakistan have vanished. Instead ghosts, hobos, poets, exiles, counts, ascetics, rabble-rousers, vagrants, and partygoers inhabit a no-man’sland where time stands still.
Salman Toor at Asian Contemporary Arts Week
Salman Toor was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and lives and works in New York City. Toor’s paintings vary in scale and style. His subjects range from autobiographical constructs to Art History and Pop Culture.
A Brooklyn- and Lahore-based Pakistani artist, Salman Toor returns to Aicon Gallery for his second solo show with 20 new paintings, both large-scale and small.