Caught Between Two Worlds, an Artist Prepares for His Biggest Show Yet

New York Times

28-04-2025

Salman Toor needed a better perspective.
Backing slowly away from his easel, the 42-year-old artist closed one eye and raised a thumb. He arched his back to gain a few more centimeters of distance and then snapped upright. Exasperation led to acceptance. He buried any doubts and raised a paintbrush, once again, to the emerald-green portrait of his mystery man in heart-shaped sunglasses.
On a morning in March, the walls were covered with dozens of new drawings, paintings and etchings that Toor has created over the last few years in anticipation of his largest exhibition to date, 'Wish Maker,' which opens May 2 across Luhring Augustine's two galleries in Manhattan. The show aims to reintroduce the artist — who was born in Lahore, Pakistan — as one of the most fascinating painters of his generation, capable of remixing old European techniques into contemporary scenes of queer desire and the immigrant experience.
This was Toor's first chance at seeing everything in one room to decide which pictures he is comfortable exhibiting at a time when his work has become more politically conflicted and emotionally raw.
'There is a lingering question,' the artist said. 'What am I doing here in America?'
Receiving his United States citizenship in 2019 and committing to life in New York felt like he was leaving his family behind to some degree. His parents remained supportive but distant; they have never seen one of his major shows in person because, he suggested, of the frank depictions of queer sexuality that run counter to their conservative community in Pakistan.
'It is too long of a conceptual distance to be comprehended,' Toor explained of his parents.
Those boundaries have remained fixed, even as Toor's celebrity has grown in international circles on the heels of last year's Venice Biennale, titled 'Stranieri Ovunque — Foreigners Everywhere.' In an exhibition, he presented a septet of paintings that he said was 'about feelings of empowerment, the humiliation of sometimes moving from one culture to another, and, I guess, the cost of that freedom for someone like me.'
Adriano Pedrosa, the biennale's curator, said that Toor had a singular style. 'I think it is very duplicitous work,' he said. 'It's not very straightforward. It is sexy; sometimes it is even violent. But on the other hand it is gorgeous painting.'
But along with his global fan base has come a new level of pressure on himself to exceed expectations.
'My life used to be very small,' said Toor, whose soft features and calming voice make stepping into his studio feel like entering the nicest therapist's office in Brooklyn. 'I didn't have my own room until I was 21 years old.'
Echoes of Home
Toor's initial breakthrough came in 2020 when a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art introduced audiences to his unique style, self-effacing humor and autobiographical scenes. The show was a hit, its 15 works bathed in emerald tones that have become the artist's signature. Writing in The New York Times, the art critic Roberta Smith said, 'The mood in these paintings is introspective yet ever-so-slightly comedic even when things turn sinister.'
Two years later, his painting called 'Four Friends' sold for nearly $1.6 million at auction.
Then, he became nervous about overexposure and becoming another young artist whose career gets caught in the boom-and-bust economics of art speculation. Toor largely retreated from the commercial side of the art world, focusing on painting in his studio and a makeshift space in Lahore when visiting family in the sun-drenched city. His color palette became more varied, including more ocean blues, acid yellows and scabby reds. His line work got looser as he became increasingly frustrated by his own conventions.
'My hand was tracing the same sort of face and the same sort of body,' Toor said. 'At some point, I had to undo the exercise of copying myself. Every now and then I have to take a step back and ask what I am doing?'
Back home last summer, Toor remembered why he left Pakistan. The country still criminalizes homosexuality with potential fines and sentences ranging from two years to life imprisonment for sexual acts, though the law is not strictly enforced. And despite being a famous artist, and in a long-term relationship with the Pakistani singer Ali Sethi, he feels discouraged from expressing his identity there.
'Going home is deeply rejuvenating,' said Toor, who painted four canvases during his last summer visit, including scenes of a Grindr hookup and a memento-mori skull.
When he graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2009, Toor was painting as if he was an apprentice of the Italian Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini. He had started making classical portraits of friends that included a strange scribble of paint above their heads. That is when Catherine Redmond, his painting professor at Pratt, knew something was about to change. His brushstrokes were becoming less about the Renaissance and more about him.
'Then the green paintings came,' she said. 'Green is a very difficult color to use because it automatically has red in it — its opposite on the color wheel — and it's such a raw color. It is hard to control. So when you're looking at one of his green paintings, you don't even know that your brain is actually seeing red.'
A darkness that once simmered below the surface of his paintings was now starting to seep through the canvas. You can see it in one of his most haunting pictures, which currently sits in the brightest corner of his studio: Titled 'Night Cemetery,' it depicts an Islamic graveyard floating in the blackness of space. It has taken two painful years to complete the work, which Toor said gained new relevance in response to the war in Gaza.
'I wanted to retreat to this peaceful, ghostly space,' Toor said. 'Where there was this presence of ancestors. I wanted to escape to this place of twilight and think about the idea of death.'
Bigger paintings than this one have vexed Toor, who prefers to work on a more intimate scale. He missed a deadline to include a large work in the 2024 Venice Biennale and must hold back another uncompleted behemoth — a New York street scene of brownstones and hunky construction workers — from his upcoming exhibition.
'It has been hellish,' Toor said, explaining that large paintings exact a physical toll that requires painting from his elbow while balancing on ladders.
Smaller images allow him to concentrate on singular themes like belonging, memory, failure, sex and comedy. But the artist requires greater complexity in his larger paintings to plumb the entire depth of human experience — a standard of perfectionism that drives his ambition.
A Newfound Confidence
Six years ago, Toor was still transporting his paintings around New York in trash bags, waiting for the art world to take notice. Now his paintings sell in galleries between $50,000 and $300,000 or more, depending on the size. According to his gallerist, Donald Johnson-Montenegro of Luhring Augustine, the drawings will sell for anywhere between $20,000 and $90,000.
But the artist still remembers his struggling start, as he built a community of queer artists in New York, including Doron Langberg and Somnath Bhatt.
Glimmers of those friends appear in his paintings; for example, the mystery man wearing heart-shaped sunglasses has the same curly hair and wide eyes as Langberg, who traded paintings with Toor in 2019 and bonded over their approaches to figurative painting.
'It's funny when I visit Salman's studio,' said Langberg, 'because he will show me a painting that I think is completely stunning, and he would say that he was going to repaint half of it. Then I would come back a few months later and he had completely reworked it.'
Langberg continued: 'He has a very specific idea of what he wants from his paintings. I don't think it is motivated by perfectionism — it's just that he has so much freedom and familiarity with this imaginative world that he is creating.'
A few weeks after our studio visit, Toor revealed that he had returned to the mystery man, adjusting his sunglasses and adding a white scarf.
The new paintings evoke feelings that ricochet between intimacy and alienation. One azure picture recalls Toor's recent trip to Paris, where friends brought him to a restaurant that seemed more like a tourist trap than haute cuisine. While they laughed themselves to tears, the wait staff glared in frustration.
'It was like a fake fantasy space,' Toor said. 'And they wanted us out of there. We were these three brown guys who were getting drunker and drunker.'
Toor enjoys a good laugh; his preoccupation with absurdity is manifested in the pink clown noses that appear throughout his paintings on certain male characters. 'I wanted them to be sort of sad and funny and pathetic,' he said. 'There's something really sweet about them, which makes me feel like I want to help this clown.'
He relishes the clown's tragicomic sense of timing, his ability to absorb anxieties and release them as laughter. That is part of why he rolls one of the clown's bulbous noses down the floor in a recent paintings from his 'Fag Puddle' series, which feature globule assemblages of body parts, theatrical costumes and technology melting together like wax candles in the microwave.
An earlier example in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on view in the contemporary art galleries, is more explicit. It features a man embracing another man's groin as a swirl of body parts, feather boas and pearls surround them. 'Heaps of fabulousness,' as the artist explained. The image serves up a jumbled expression of queer desire and failure — and the strangest part of this dreamy tableau is the smartphone painted onto its periphery, as if the scene was being recorded.
Toor explained that his own desire for security comes from the intense feelings of vulnerability growing up in Pakistan. Art history was a refuge in those times. Pictures of time-tested masters like Caravaggio and Peter Paul Rubens became aspirational, and tracing those images allowed Toor to feel like he was part of something greater.
But the new paintings indicate that Toor doesn't need the old masters. His painting has moved on with newfound confidence, rendered in a distinct style.
'I'm part of that story now,' he said.