Salman Toor to See First Solo Show in Europe Next Year

Salman Toor b. 1983, Pakistan Follow +

The Courtauld Gallery in London have announced their 2026 programme, with Pakistani-born, New York-based painter Salman Toor’s first solo exhibition in Europe a particular highlight. 

Entitled Someone Like You, the exhibition will bring around 20 of the artist’s most emblematic canvases to London, with standouts like The Bar on East 13th (2019), which draws directly from one of the Courtauld’s collection highlights, Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) .

The show will coincide with a selection of Toor’s works on paper in the museum’s drawings gallery, including Fag Puddle in Vitrine (2021), acquired by the Courtauld just last year.

Toor’s profile has skyrocketed in the past five years as his intimate paintings of queer, South Asian men have proven popular with institutions and the art market alike. Inspired by a wide array of art historical references, their greenish hue and nightlife scenes are reminiscent of work by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, another artist well represented in the Courtauld’s collection.

But Someone Like You will not be the first time Toor has exhibited alongside historical collections: In 2021, Toor’s Museum Boys (2021) was displayed alongside two Vermeer paintings at the Frick Collection in New York. The following year, his solo show at the Baltimore Museum of Art featured paintings directly inspired by van Dyck masterpieces in the museum collection.

This past summer, Toor enjoyed his largest solo show to date with a two venue exhibition across New York City with Luhring Augustine, who co-represents the artist alongside Thomas Dane Gallery. 

His breakout show at the Whitney Museum of Art in 2020 opened to rave reviews, with Ocula calling the artist at the time ‘one of the most exciting new figurative painters to have emerged over the last few years.’ 

Toor said the work depicts queer and immigrant lives straddling different cultures and inhabiting the tension between ‘intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement’, along with ‘what it means to find a community, but also the daily costs associated with visibility,’ sentiments which have become increasingly urgent in the past year. —[O]

Main image: Salman Toor, The Bar on East 13th (2019) (detail). Oil on panel. 91.4 x 121.9 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Thomas Dane Gallery. © Salman Toor