This is probably the best exhibition I’ve seen so far opening for Frieze Week.
There’s an extraordinary energy to Salman Toor’s paintings — excitement, danger, humour, intimacy and a real love of life. Figures dance, flirt, wait, drift, pose and disappear into themselves. There is joy here, but also vulnerability; the feeling that belonging is never quite secure and that being seen can be both liberating and risky.
The Courtauld’s new exhibition is the first solo show in Europe devoted to Toor and brings together 19 paintings made since 2019, alongside a special display of drawings.
Born in Lahore and now based in New York, Toor paints fictional scenes rooted in personal experience and memory. His subjects are often young queer South Asian men moving through bars, museums, parties, bedrooms and border-control spaces — moments of friendship and desire sitting alongside solitude, scrutiny and alienation.
As Toor puts it, the works explore:
“queer and immigrant lives that straddle different cultures and inhabit the tension between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement.”
That tension gives the paintings much of their charge.
In The Bar on 13th Street (2019), a bartender with braids, nail polish and ribbons emerges from a dimly lit interior that pulls together contemporary nightlife with echoes of Dutch tavern painting and Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. In Bar Boy (2019), a young man lit by his phone stands isolated inside the noise and movement of an East Village club.
Elsewhere, Toor turns to the experience of borders and immigration. Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug (2019) shows a man waiting while his possessions are inspected by a customs official, turning an everyday encounter into something psychologically loaded. Works including Group B and Citizens return to questions of restriction, visibility and who is permitted to move freely.
One of the pleasures of the exhibition is how naturally Toor moves between contemporary life and art history.
His admiration for the Old Masters, Baroque painting, the Mughal School and 18th-century painting sits alongside references to photography, graphic novels and contemporary image culture. In Museum Boys (2021), Vermeer-like clothing meets a strange museum display containing a pink shoe, a sleeping male body and an inverted urinal. The Joke (2024) twists the atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Parisian nightlife into a contemporary tourist scene.
And then there is Ghost Ball (2023), one of Toor’s largest paintings, where bodies dance together in a scene inspired by the 18th-century Indian painting Dancing Villagers. It has the same quality that runs throughout the exhibition: movement, desire, connection and the sense that something could tip at any moment from celebration into danger.
That is what makes the show feel so alive.
Toor’s paintings are beautifully constructed, but they never feel overly controlled. They carry the energy of nightlife, friendship, sex, anxiety and freedom all at once. There is tenderness, but also risk. Humour, but also fear. Above all, there is a sense of people trying to find one another — and themselves — inside the chaos of contemporary life.
For me, that makes this one of the standout exhibitions opening for Frieze Week.
Salman Toor: Someone Like You, 2nd October 2026 – 10th January 2027, Courtauld
Also on at the same time: Salman Toor: Drawings, 2nd October 2026 – 10th January 2027, Courtauld
The exhibition is accompanied by a new catalogue, edited by Dr Elena Crippa, Senior Curator of Contemporary at the Courtauld Gallery, with contributions by Richard Meyer, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History, Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University, California; and Aziz Sohail, a curator, writer and PhD candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, Melbourne.
Limited-edition print: Exclusive to the Courtauld, Boy Behind Rope, 2026, has been developed in partnership with Salman Toor to celebrate this landmark exhibition. Limited-edition of 50, each print is hand-signed and dated by the artist and comes presented in a handmade portfolio with a certificate of authenticity. Available to purchase exclusively in the Courtauld Shop.
Saturday Study Event, 28 November 2026: Join an in-person study event accompanying with the exhibition curator, Dr Elena Crippa. Learn more: courtauld.ac.uk/short-courses-2026/saturday-study/
Frank Davis Memorial Lecture series, November 2026 – January 2027 The Courtauld Research Forum will organise a series of lectures to coincide with the exhibition, inviting an international roster of academics, curators, conservators and practitioners including Aziz Sohail, Evan Moffitt, and Saloni Mathur to reflect on materiality, identity, storytelling, and politics in the art of the South Asian diaspora. Learn more.
