From queer underground nights to quiet moments alone, Salman Toor paints the freedom, desire and uncertainty of finding your place. Someone Like You, running until 10 January 2027 at The Courtauld Gallery in London, brings together nineteen paintings tracing the friendships, encounters and private moments that shaped his twenties.
There is a particular kind of freedom in Toor’s paintings: the feeling of being young, out late, surrounded by people who understand something about you. His figures drink, dance, flirt, disappear into crowds and retreat into bedrooms. Many of the scenes draw on his own memories of the queer underground in his twenties, when nightlife opened up a new world of possibility. But the freedom is never completely uncomplicated. A crowded room can feel intimate; a moment between two people can feel exposed. His characters seem to be learning, in real time, what it means to be seen and what it means to disappear.
Born in Lahore in 1983, Toor now lives and works in New York. His paintings are fictional, but his own experiences are never far away. He paints queer and immigrant lives moving between cultures, with all the contradictions that can come with them. A night out can be joyful, awkward, intimate or lonely. Several of those things happen at once. Toor has described his work as depicting lives that “straddle different cultures” and “inhabit the tension between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement.” The city plays an important role. Bars, streets, apartments and bedrooms recur throughout his paintings, becoming familiar settings for his characters. They are not grand or dramatic spaces. They are the places where people actually spend time together: drinking, talking, flirting, waiting, going home.
Toor’s relationship with European painting is just as present. He has long looked to the Old Masters, particularly Baroque and eighteenth-century painters. One of the exhibition’s principal works, The Bar on East 13th (2019), takes Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) as its starting point. The famous Parisian bar becomes a New York setting filled with Toor’s own characters and references.
These are striking paintings to place inside The Courtauld. Toor is an artist whose work is deeply informed by the European canon. Still, his paintings bring another set of experiences into it: queer nightlife, South Asian identity, migration, friendship and desire.
Someone Like You is his first solo museum exhibition in Europe, bringing nineteen paintings to the Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries. The exhibition is accompanied by a display of Toor’s drawings in the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery. Among them is Fag Puddle in Vitrine (2021), which The Courtauld acquired in 2024. His drawings have the same intimacy as the paintings, often centring on figures, gestures and fleeting encounters.
Toor’s paintings are full of people looking at each other, being looked at, disappearing into crowds and finding somewhere to spend the night. There is freedom in them, but it is never simple or permanent. Packed bars give way to quiet bedrooms, and bodies pressed together give way to figures sitting alone. At the centre of it all is the strange feeling of being young, out late, and not quite ready to go home.
