Foliage, pencil, charcoal and gouache on paper, 2024, Salman Toor. Image: Genevieve Hanson; © Salman Toor, Courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York, and Thomas Dane Gallery
In a wooded clearing, a solitary figure sits on a swing. To his left, a few metres away, a couple embraces, limbs indistinguishable. To his right, at a height, a pile of sleeping bodies. Just past a tree, in the shadows, two people walk hand in hand. Each permutation of bodies brings new meaning to the space. Is this a site of play? Of desire? Of rest? Drenched in a nocturnal green and rendered in thick, directional brush strokes, the scene is as much about space as it is about the corporeal ways in which it can be altered. This is painter Salman Toor’s (b. 1983) A Meeting Place (2024), part of his solo exhibition Wish Maker, currently on view at Luhring Augustine in New York.
Wish Maker marks the first major presentation of Toor’s work since his breakout institutional show at the Whitney in 2020, a moment that catapulted the New York-based, Pakistan-born painter into art world stardom. His largest to date, the show is set across the gallery’s two locations, with 19 oil paintings on view in Chelsea and a further 44 works on paper on display in Tribeca. Encountering this substantial corpus, spaced generously across the gallery’s walls, is like stepping into a convergence of the painter’s many worlds. Toor takes the viewer into New York bedrooms and Lahori public parks, crowded bars and lonely cemeteries, street corners and hospitals, bringing us a world of communal life in which outsiderness, joy, violence, and safety all intersect. The range of works on display is considerable – from compact, single-subject canvases that measure less than a foot across to works that are four feet tall and richly peopled. Bringing them together is a distinct painterly hand – marked by rich monochromatic palettes, luscious layers of paint and a singular attention to detail.
Speaking in 2011 on the triangulation of bodies, assembly and politics, Judith Butler urges us to “think about bodies together, what holds them there, their conditions of persistence and of power”. In Wish Maker, as in much of Toor’s work, there is a preoccupation with bodies – queer, brown, diasporic – and their relational meanings, both internal and external. In Foliage (2024), a work on paper on display in Tribeca, we are presented with another wooded space, this time at closer quarters. In muted nighttime tones, male figures recline in various acts of communion – more and less clothed, more and less explicitly sexual. Their dress is identifiably South Asian, the low wall behind them reminiscent of a work titled Night Cemetery (2025, also on view). Rendering forms of assembly that are eked out in forbidden spaces, and under the cover of night, Toor prompts a consideration of the spatial politics of desire, and the transgressive, if still fragile, forms of assembly that resist it.
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