The Courtauld will present the first solo exhibition in Europe dedicated to Salman Toor, bringing together 19 paintings and a special display of drawings by the Lahore-born, New York-based artist.
Salman Toor: Someone Like You will bring some of the artist’s most acclaimed paintings to Britain for the first time, exploring friendship, love, desire and the struggle to find a sense of belonging.
Born in Lahore in 1983 and now based in New York, Toor has become known for tender, sensual paintings of imagined queer and immigrant lives. His figures gather in bars, clubs, apartments and museums, caught between intimacy and exposure, community and isolation.
While fictional, the scenes draw on Toor’s own experiences and memories. As the artist puts it, his works “depict queer and immigrant lives that straddle different cultures and inhabit the tension between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement.”
The exhibition brings together 19 paintings made since 2019, a period during which Toor has emerged as one of the most distinctive figurative painters of his generation.
Among the earliest works is The Bar on 13th Street, 2019 (Top image), in which a bartender wearing braids, nail polish, ribbons and a gold bangle draws together references ranging from 17th-century Dutch tavern scenes to Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère—one of the Courtauld’s own masterpieces.
That direct connection to the collection makes the Courtauld a particularly fitting setting for Toor, whose work is deeply rooted in an engagement with art history.
In Bar Boy (2019), a young man illuminated by his smartphone stands isolated within the crowded nightlife of New York’s East Village. Elsewhere, the exhibition turns to the experiences of immigrants crossing borders and the freedom—or restriction—that can come with visibility.
Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug (2019) shows a man waiting as his belongings are inspected by a customs official, while Group B (2020) and Citizens (2022) continue Toor’s exploration of marginalised figures confronted by systems of control.
Throughout the exhibition, Toor’s contemporary subjects collide with an expansive range of art historical references. Baroque and 18th-century European painting meet the Mughal School, contemporary photography and graphic novels.
The Joke (2024) transports the atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Parisian nightlife into the contemporary world of tourism, while Museum Boys (2021) brings Vermeer-like fashion—a wide-brimmed hat, shawl and pearl earring—into an encounter with a vitrine containing a pink shoe, a half-naked sleeping man and an inverted urinal.
One of the exhibition’s largest works, Ghost Ball (2023), on loan from the Pinault Collection, depicts a group of figures dancing alongside musicians. The painting takes inspiration from Dancing Villagers, attributed to the 18th-century Indian artist Pandit Seu.
The exhibition includes major loans from the Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, National Gallery of Art in Washington, Baltimore Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art and the Pinault Collection, alongside works from private collections.
A parallel display in the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery will reveal the role drawing plays within Toor’s practice. It includes Fag Puddle in Vitrine (2021), acquired by the Courtauld in 2024, alongside further works on paper.
Toor’s first major museum solo exhibition, How Will I Know, opened at the Whitney Museum in 2020. No Ordinary Love followed at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2022 before touring the United States, while a suite of his paintings was included in the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.
At the Courtauld, however, the historical conversations embedded in Toor’s paintings will become physical ones. His bars, border crossings, smartphones, queer communities and contemporary outsiders will enter a museum he has long admired, surrounded by many of the traditions he has spent his career looking at, borrowing from and remaking.
Salman Toor: Someone Like You, 2nd October 2026 – 10 Jan 2027 Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, Floor 3 courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/exh-salman-toor-someone-like-you/
Salman Toor: Drawings, 2nd October 2026 – 10 Jan 2027, Gilbert and Ildik Butler Drawings Gallery, Floor 1 courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/exh-salman-toor-drawings/
