Salman Toor Comes to the Courtauld

Salman Toor’s paintings of queer life and belonging arrive at the Courtauld Gallery for his first solo exhibition in Europe. To celebrate, AnOther and Dazed Club are giving readers the chance to win discounted tickets. Find out how

“What it means to find a community, but also the daily costs associated with visibility,” Salman Toor says of his paintings. The Pakistan-born, New York-based artist makes sensual, aching and humorous pictures about friendship and desire, belonging and estrangement, company and solitude. His figures drift through bars, bedrooms and museums, or find themselves stalled beneath the clinical glare of border control. They snog, dance, lounge, then reappear alone caught in private moments of uncertainty. Though fictional, Toor’s scenes are rooted in his memories and experiences depicting, in his words, “queer and immigrant lives that straddle different cultures”.

This October, those worlds arrive at the Courtauld Gallery for Salman Toor: Someone Like You, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe. Bringing together 19 paintings made since 2019, alongside a separate display of drawings, the exhibition traces the messy, intimate business of finding your place.

Born in Lahore in 1983, Toor is an unabashed student of painting. He draws from the Old Masters, Baroque and 18th-century art, the Mughal School, photography and graphic novels, tugging those references firmly into the present. His pictures glow with acidic emerald greens and murky nocturnal light, faces emerge from smoky rooms, bodies crowd together beneath chandeliers and phones throw their cold little pools of light across painterly darkness. New York nightlife and the domestic are given the compositional weight of art-historical tableaux.

That dialogue is clear in the utterly captivating The Bar on 13th Street (2019). Its elaborately adorned bartender with braids and painted nails draws on 17th-century Dutch tavern scenes while directly recalling Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), one of the jewels of the Courtauld’s permanent collection. Elsewhere, Bar Boy (2019) catches a young man lit by his phone amid the crush of an East Village club, isolated even in a crowd, while Museum Boys (2021) folds Vermeer-like fashions, a pink shoe and a Duchamp-like inverted urinal into the same strange encounter. Toor’s paintings can be tender, erotic or melancholic, but they are often very funny too – life rendered with the gravity of an Old Master and a generous dose of mischief. “I was using painting to be ‘out’ – and to tell stories I had censored for years,” Toor has said previously.

Following exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Baltimore Museum of Art, and his inclusion in the 2024 Venice Biennale, Someone Like You marks Toor’s first major European exhibition. To celebrate, AnOther and Dazed Club are partnering with the Courtauld to give readers the chance to see it for themselves, with tickets available to purchase at a discounted rate exclusively through the Dazed Club app.

Salman Toor: Someone Like You runs at the Courtauld Gallery from 2 October 2026 to 10 January 2027. Secure your discounted tickets through Dazed Club here