Talk

MFA Fine Arts presents a virtual artist talk with Salman Toor. Toor’s sumptuous and insightful figurative paintings depict intimate, quotidian moments in the lives of fictional young, brown, queer men ensconced in contemporary cosmopolitan culture. His work oscillates between heartening and harrowing, seductive and poignant, inviting and eerie. In many of his paintings, he creates subtly disarming depictions of familiar domestic environments in which often-marginalized bodies flourish in safety and comfort. In other pieces, Toor creates allegorical spaces of waiting, anticipation and apprehension; border crossings into a world that may or may not be welcoming. Central to his work are the anxieties and the comedy of identity. In creating his figures, he employs and destabilizes specific tropes in order to reflect on the way difference is perceived by the self and by others. As Whitney Museum curators Christopher Lew and Ambika Trasi have noted, Toor’s project is one that examines “vulnerability within contemporary public and private life and the notion of community in the context of queer, diasporic identity.” Furthermore, in depicting the mundane and the memorable moments of his characters’ lives, Toor reveals a deeply relatable existence, ultimately creating an opportunity for empathy through the language of painting.

Toor was born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1983 and currently lives and works in New York. He studied painting and drawing at Ohio Wesleyan University and received his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. The artist’s second institutional solo-exhibition, “Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love,” organized by and originally on view at Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland, in 2022, is touring the US with upcoming presentations at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida, Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawai’i and Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Other recent solo exhibitions include “Salman Toor: How Will I Know,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and “The Pleasure Pavilion: A Series of installations | Salman Toor” at Luhring Augustine Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York.

Toor’s work was also recently included in “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters at Frick Madison,” New York, and an image of his painting Music Room (2021) was featured on the Hayward Gallery Billboard, London, in 2022. Toor’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions and projects, including most recently “Any Distance Between Us,” RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; “I will wear you in my heart of heart,” FLAG Art Foundation, New York; “Relations: Diaspora and Painting,” Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montréal, Canada; and “Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago,” Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

Toor is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and his work is in the permanent collections of the Tate, London, United Kingdom; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; M Woods, Beijing, China; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; and Wake Forest University Art Collection, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A major solo presentation of his work will be presented at M Woods, Beijing, December 2022 – March 2023.