Living Histories: In Conversation with Salman Toor
The Frick Collection
Salman Toor
Man with Flag, 2022
Oil on linen
49 x 41 inches
(124.5 x 104.1 cm)
Salman Toor’s sumptuous and insightful figurative paintings depict intimate, quotidian moments in the lives of imagined 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 comedies 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 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.
Living Histories: In Conversation with Salman Toor
The Frick Collection
Salman Toor’s Emerald Green
From the Art21 “New York Close Up” series
Salman Toor in conversation with Asma Naeem and Evan Moffitt
November 17, 2022
Luhring Augustine Tribeca
The Pleasure Pavilion: A series of installations
featuring Salman Toor
March 4–April 10, 2021
Luhring Augustine Bushwick
For more information, please contact Donald Johnson Montenegro at donald@luhringaugustine.com.
