Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love

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Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love is an extraordinary exhibition that will be on display at the Rose Art Museum from November 16, 2023. This exhibition brings together more than 45 recent paintings and works on paper by the Pakistan-born artist, Salman Toor. Through his art, Toor explores his experiences as a Queer diasporic South Asian man, creating imaginative new worlds that challenge traditional notions of power and sexuality. The exhibition also features Toor’s sketchbooks, offering a unique glimpse into his creative process. Exploring Themes of Desire, Family, and Tradition Raiannamei Elad ‘23 said, “He merges his different identities through his art in a way that is compelling and beautiful to the audience. You can feel the turmoil and conflict he experienced but also how much growth has occurred when he accepted who he is.” Using a signature palette of rich emerald greens, Toor’s paintings are infused with both melancholy and glamour. These moody depictions amplify small moments of existence, blending vulnerability, desire, violence and celebration in compositions based on Toor’s imagination. Vivid brushstrokes radiate throughout the canvas, creating an atmospheric distance that suggests both intimacy and isolation.

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love - US NEWS Glory Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love - US NEWS

The exhibition challenges outdated concepts of power and sexuality, centering Queer figures of color. The exhibition is curated by Asma Naeem, the BMA’s Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, including essays by Naeem as well as writers Evan Moffitt and Hanya Yanagihara. Exchange Show, Montclair University MFA Gallery, Montclair, New Jersey Pratt MFA Thesis Show, Stueben Gallery, Brooklyn [28] Living in his native Lahore, Toor became deeply knowledgeable about the works of modern Pakistani and Indian painters. Parallel to this, he studied old European masters, avidly copying works by Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and others. Painting distinct hybrid compositions using his brilliant textural brushstrokes and bold ‘Emerald Green’ palette, Toor explores his experiences as a Queer diasporic South Asian man, creating imaginative new worlds for the 21st century.

Exploring Themes of Desire, Family, and Tradition

Toor's work is included in such museum collections as the Whitney Museum of American Art [16] and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. [17] Work [ edit ]

Salman Toor - Artists - Luhring Augustine Salman Toor - Artists - Luhring Augustine

The Rose Art Museum fosters community, experimentation, and scholarship through direct engagement with modern and contemporary art, artists, and ideas. Founded in 1961, the Rose is among the nation’s preeminent university art museums and houses one of New England's most extensive collections of modern and contemporary art. Through its exceptional collection, support of emerging artists, and innovative programming, the Museum serves as a nexus for art and social justice at Brandeis University and beyond. Located just 20 minutes from downtown Boston, the Rose Art Museum is open Wednesdays–Sundays, 11 AM–5 PM. Admission is free. At Aitchison College, a boys-only institution, built by the British when Pakistan was part of India and Britain ruled the subcontinent, Toor’s femininity made him the butt of teasing and bullying. Every day, students followed him down the halls, talking in high voices and imitating his swinging gait—“sashaying,” as he calls it. There were a few occasions when he was pushed around and roughed up, but nobody ever hated him, and things improved in the middle school at Aitchison, when his ability to draw brought him respect and admiration. “A lot of kids completely changed their mind about who I was,” he said. Older students asked him to make nude portraits of their imagined girlfriends. The whole school became aware of Toor when he turned sixteen and took the O-level exams—an imperial tradition (they’re now officially known as I.G.C.S.E.s)—and earned world distinction, scoring in the one-hundredth percentile in art. “Salman was prodigiously talented,” Komail Aijazuddin, one of his schoolmates, told me. “He knew light and shape in a way that was almost irritatingly intuitive.” The Doodler shows a child hiding in a bedroom, drawing away; The Game has an ominous father figure standing, tense, over a small boy caught playing with dolls. Does making these pictures help you better face your past? For our last conversation, Toor had prepared a slide show (on his computer) of paintings, drawings, photographs, and other images that he thought I should see. The first was a painting of his called “Three Friends in a Cab,” which is in the show at the Baltimore Museum. “These guys are at the end of a night out, and they’re being rowdy and maybe that’s a Muslim cabdriver who doesn’t like them,” he said. “I want to do more of these. I’m definitely interested in cabdrivers.” Moving on, he brought up a work by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Gerard ter Borch. “This is ‘A Glass of Lemonade,’ one of my favorite paintings,” Toor said. “I just couldn’t believe it was in Baltimore. The young man is stirring a glass of lemonade for the young lady, and their fingers are just touching—it’s an amazingly sensual scene.” The slide show was going to be unstructured, I could see. Toor can seem mild-mannered and deferential, but he has iron-clad confidence in his own impulses. Waltham, Mass. September 2023)— Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, on view at the Rose Art Museum November 16, 2023–February 11, 2024, brings together more than 45 recent paintings and works on paper by the Pakistan-born, New York-based artist. The exhibition will also display two of Toor’s sketchbooks, illuminating his creative process. Exploring his experiences as a Queer diasporic South Asian man, Toor weaves motifs found in historical paintings with contemporary moments to create imaginative new worlds for the 21st century. Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love explores themes of desire, family, and tradition while capturing Toor’s unique ability to engage with and reimagine art historical traditions. Toor’s distinct hybrid compositions center Queer figures of color and reconsider outdated concepts of power and sexuality.

A Glimpse into Toor’s Creative Process

When Toor graduated from Ohio Wesleyan, in 2006, he went to New York. Komail Aijazuddin was still at N.Y.U., living in a two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, and Toor and Ali Sethi, who had just graduated from Harvard, moved in with him. Toor got a job in the marketing department of a now defunct art magazine. It was the only job he ever had. “Within a couple of months, I felt like I was wasting my time,” he told me. “I didn’t have any time to paint, so I just stopped. I applied to a bunch of grad schools, and got into Pratt. Incredibly, my father decided to pay for it. I did tell him that this level of education would make it easier for me to make a living. But I’m still surprised.

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It was a warmish night in early May. The house has five floors, and there are Currin paintings on almost every wall. A larger-than-life sculpture by Feinstein, of the Italian clown Punchinello and his family, fills the entrance hall. When Toor arrived, wearing a loose, saffron-colored linen shirt over matching pants, Feinstein showed him around. “These are portraits of the kids that John’s been doing over the years,” she said. “This is one of me when I was thirty—before the kids. Now my portraits look like I’m angry.” Toor recognized almost every painting by name, from reproductions he’d seen. Currin joined us in the sitting room, and shook hands with Toor. They sat down near a blazing fire. “John wants the drama of fires even when it’s a thousand degrees outside,” Feinstein explained. “He turns up the air-conditioning beforehand.” Salman Toor (born 1983) is a Pakistani painter based in the United States. His works depict the imagined lives of young men of South Asian-birth, displayed in close range in either South Asia and New York City fantasized settings. [1] Toor lives and works in New York City. Truax, Stephen (2017-11-07). "Why Young Queer Artists Are Trading Anguish for Joy". Artsy . Retrieved 2019-06-13. Salman 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, NY. Salman Toor: How Will I Know, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, was recently presented at the Whitney Museum (2020–21).The inclusion of a variety of works aligns with the museum’s mission statement, which says: “This belief is that art is at the heart of the BMA…with a commitment to artistic excellence and social equity in every decision from art presentation, interpretation, and collecting… creating a museum welcoming to all.” Salman Toor was born in 1983 in Lahore,Pakistan. He attended Aitchison College. [2] Toor came to the United States to attend school at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2006. [3] He then obtained his MFA degree from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2009. [4] Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love is organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and curated by Dr. Asma Naeem, Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. The Rose Art Museum presentation is organized by Dr. Gannit Ankori, Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator and Professor of Fine Arts and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University with contributions by Dorian Keeffe, Collections Care and Exhibition Production Assistant.

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love Open November 16 at Rose Art

Toor explained that a few years ago he had started looking for new solutions to the way he was thinking. “I wanted to have parts of the painting that responded to my need for realism, and other parts that were deliberately sketchlike and a bit irreverent,” he said. The solution came unexpectedly in 2016. Toor was living in an East Village apartment that he had rented when Atiya left for Canada. He had never wanted his own work in places where he lived, but for a while he hung some of the new, “straightforward” paintings on the walls of his apartment. These were the images that came out of his head, without fine-art sources. “I’ll just paint whatever I feel like,” he told me he had decided. “I’m not going to ban anything. And what I ended up doing were very simple, illustrative, graphic-novel-like images.” He painted himself and his friends at dinner tables and bars, on front stoops and street corners. The figures are realistic but not entirely so. He painted them directly on the canvas, with no preliminary drawings or sketches. “I draw with the brush,” he said. “I didn’t want to plan.” (He jots down visual ideas for paintings in small notebooks, using a ballpoint pen, but when he starts a new painting he works from memory or from invention.) His new paintings were small, and they didn’t take very long to do. “I was thinking less about how to play with form and more about what I urgently needed to paint,” he said. “When I put a group of these pictures together on a wall, they did create a cloud of meaning, so I started going more and more in that direction.” No! I had a show in New York called Time after Time, and then I used a Sade title for my show at the Baltimore Museum: No Ordinary Love. I’ve done Sade, I’ve done Whitney… Maybe I should do Mariah? Actually, for the Chinese show they wanted me to do another song title, and I said: I’m done. So it’s just called New Paintings and Drawings. There was talk about the art market and how you could avoid paying astronomic prices for Old Master paintings. “You can get things if there’s a penis, or a naked man’s butt,” Feinstein said. “And, if there’s a lot of the color green, they’re affordable.” The discontinuities in a Toor slide show can be epic. I saw photographs of a burly, “really handsome” construction worker doing manly things in Lahore, and of Toor’s uncle’s wedding in the nineteen-sixties, also in Lahore. “This is a miniature from the nineteenth century, after the East India Company was established and the English were the lords and masters of India,” Toor explained. “A style of painting developed at that point, called Company Painting; it was done by local artists, and showed the overlords with their servants and possessions. There’s a power relationship here that I’m very interested in.” We looked at paintings of his friend Alexandra Atiya, and examples of ancient Gandhara sculptures, which, he said, have “a particular hair style I love—a bun in the center of the head, and the hair that cascades down—you also see that in Buddhist art.” On and on it went: an early painting by Philip Guston, and one by Alice Neel (“I just love the speed of it”); Nicole Eisenman’s rendering of a dinner party; Toor’s 2017 portrait of Ali Sethi, singing.

Redefining Art Historical Traditions

Not long after Toor’s return to New York in 2011, he made a large painting that was unlike anything he had done before. The title, “9PM, the News,” suggests current events, but the painting is deeply personal. “I wanted to re-create a sense of depression through a family dinner table,” he told me. “It was my first completely imaginary painting. I had used art-historical sources for a very long time, a very enjoyable time. For a decade, I didn’t want to do anything else, but it was just getting less exciting over the years. I thought this one would be just for me—I wouldn’t show it.” Curators have noted Toor's paintings make use of bright, saturated colors to evoke emotion. [18] Green is one of the most notable colors in his work. The artist cites the “nocturnal" [19] quality that green can give to a painting, as well as its conflicting associations with poison and glamor. Toor works from memory and often depicts his friends in his paintings. It’s about a sense of humour. A lot of the time, I might be painting someone really vulnerable, and I feel like if it was a pity party or too sanctimonious, it would just kill the painting. I want it to have a marionette feel: a little bit wooden, but at the same time someone who can be hurt. Parts and Things,” a green painting of sundry items of clothing and body parts piled on the floor of a closet, previewed Toor’s semi-abstract “Fag Puddle” series. In “Sleeping Boy,” a young man who resembles Toor lies on white sheets so lusciously painted that they look edible, his face and his naked body illuminated by light from an open laptop. Toor’s virtuoso handling of paint brings the images to life, and the stories they tell, whether simple or complex, catch and engage viewers’ attention. The Whitney show launched Toor as an international art star, a role that he has no intention of playing. He joined the Luhring Augustine gallery in 2020, but instead of doubling or tripling his prices on the primary market Toor and the gallery agreed to keep them relatively low and increase them gradually. “I don’t want a big, intimidating number to enter my head while I’m in the studio,” he said to me. “That would really destroy the process.”