Salman Toor at the Courtauld Gallery: social scenes, unease

Born in Lahore and based in New York, Toor is shown in a setting that speaks directly to his art: The Bar on 13th St (2019) hangs in the same museum as Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère, which it openly reworks. The exhibition begins in 2019, a turning point, curator Elena Crippa says, when Toor started making his personal experience and queer identity more explicit.

His genre scenes often place queer brown men at the centre of moments that feel social, intimate or uneasy. In Three Men in a Taxi (2021), the viewer is squeezed into the back seat with three friends; in Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug (2019), US border control after 11 September becomes an image of tension and exposure; in Twilight Story (2023), memories of Lahore carry both nostalgia and threat.

A brushwork that loosens its grip

What makes the show especially interesting for painters is the way Toor keeps changing how he paints. Later works become looser and more unstable: proportions slip, space collapses and figures can seem ghostlike, as in The Joke (2024), where an upscale restaurant scene starts to break apart under the pressure of line and paint.

A whole downstairs room is devoted to drawings, from preparatory studies to pages that feel diaristic. They show how exact Toor’s hand remains even as his compositions become less reliant on preliminary drawings, and how the Fag Puddles series turns personal objects into precarious arrangements charged with memory.