The presentation of Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love at the Honolulu Museum of Art forms part of a national tour. Ah – that’s simple. I have to refrain from taking a picture of it when a session is over – which takes six to seven hours, at least, because it takes me three hours to just control myself. After that, if I’m into it, I’m like: “I’m just gonna live here, I’m gonna die here in front of it, this is my life! I have nothing else to do.” But I don’t photograph it. When I come in the next day, I sit in front of it, I open my eyes – and I know. Stop Play Pause Repeat, Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, Dubai Letters to Taseer II, Drawing Room Gallery, Lahore 2010 [28]

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love | Baltimore Museum of Art Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love | Baltimore Museum of Art

Currin looked at Toor. “I have bad news,” he said. “You use a lot of green, and there are guys’ asses. Learn now to hang drywalls is all I’ve got to say.” Toor has a gift for evoking complex narratives and emotions,” said Tyler Cann, HoMA’s senior curator of modern and contemporary art. “There is real tenderness in his work but also ambiguity, absurdity and humor. His paintings speak to navigating contemporary social life within different, even conflicting, cultural contexts, and we hope that will resonate with the layered communities of Hawai‘i.” A vital part of Hawaiʻi’s cultural landscape, HoMA is a unique gathering place where art, global worldviews, culture and education converge in the heart of Honolulu. In addition to an internationally renowned permanent collection, the museum houses innovative exhibitions, an art school, an independent art house theatre, a café and a museum shop within one of the most beautiful, iconic buildings in Hawaiʻi. Much has been made of the glowing green auras of Salman Toor’s work: Toor’s palette drapes ordinary moments in a mantle of dramatic tension. The paintings in Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love at the Baltimore Museum of Art are filled with the flotsam of performance: clown suits, feather boas, spotlights. While writing about Toor’s paintings the language of the theater constantly comes to mind: the set dressing, the costumes, the props, the actors in the paintings, the paintings as actors. Above all, the most profound dialogue at play in the exhibition is between Toor and the art historical tradition. My high-school friend’s parents collected art, and had libraries; my parents are not really readers. So I had access to the deliciousness of art monographs – Caravaggio and stuff like that. But my grandmother had a bunch of prints of paintings. She had a portrait of this white woman in a grey dress and grey hair, standing against a stone column; I found out later, when I went to college, that it was The Honourable Mrs Graham by Thomas Gainsborough. I just remember feeling something seeing these artists from Europe: from another part of the world, from a completely different time. There was a sense of this very tragic heroism – of finding both the romantic and the grisly. That was very valuable.

Key Takeaways:

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: No Ordinary Love features more than 45 paintings and works on paper made between 2019 and 2022, that weave together motifs found in historical paintings with recognizable 21st-century moments to create new worlds based in Toor’s imagination. The exhibition captures the ways in which Toor engages with art history to center brown, queer figures and to challenge enshrined notions of power and sexuality. 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 Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Salman Toor: How Will I Know, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, was recently presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2020-21). Truax, Stephen (2017-11-07). "Why Young Queer Artists Are Trading Anguish for Joy". Artsy . Retrieved 2019-06-13. 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.

Upcoming Exhibitions | Exhibitions | Rose Art Museum Upcoming Exhibitions | Exhibitions | Rose Art Museum

Toor said, “ I like these… bodies of color inhabiting familiar, bourgeois, urban, interior spaces… Sometimes they can look like lifestyle images. They are also fantasies about myself and my community.” Poignant portraits of young men recur throughout your work. Did you, as a youngster, imagine the life and career you’d have today? Toor continued to paint (and sell) art-history-sourced pictures for several years after that, but every so often he would do another work that came completely from his imagination. In 2015, deciding that the new paintings should be seen, he put twenty-three of them in a show called “Resident Alien,” at Aicon Gallery. The Tate, in London, bought “9PM, the News,” and most of the other paintings found buyers, but according to Toor the “Resident Alien” pictures were too much for some of his regular clients. I counted fifty-three men and women and five ghosts in “Rooftop Party with Ghosts,” a seventeen-and-a-half-foot-long triptych in which the figures mingle amiably, sip drinks, flirt, argue, smoke, work cell phones, tell jokes, or just enjoy the night air, under a dark sky that is populated with letters from the Persian alphabet. Many of the subjects have long, pointed noses—a detail that was becoming a Toor trademark—but otherwise the faces are highly individualized, with expressions that were keenly observed and true to life. “For Allen Ginsberg,” a diptych, is almost as densely populated as “Rooftop Party.” In my view, these paintings mark a bold departure that doesn’t quite go anywhere. “I don’t really know how to make a big picture,” Toor told me. “I make small pictures within the big picture.” He was going to keep trying, he said, and if it didn’t work he would be happy to be an artist of small paintings, like Elizabeth Peyton. No Ordinary Love captures the ways in which Toor upends art historical traditions to center brown, queer figures and to investigate outdated concepts of power and sexuality. The exhibition will also include a selection of the artist’s sketchbooks.

A Captivating and Profound Exhibition

Weaving together contemporary scenes with historical motifs drawn from European, American and South Asian artistic traditions, Toor’s work tells stories of family life, queer desire and immigrant experience. Toor lives and works in New York City but grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, where he was born. Working from this perspective, his paintings center Brown, queer figures and reflect on power and sexuality in shifting cultural environments. Currin jumped up to greet her, and then he said, “I’m going to move away from the fire. I like the aesthetics of a fire but not the heat.” For the Rose presentation of No Ordinary Love, the exhibition will be nestled within the museum’s permanent collection, creating formal and thematic dialogues between Toor’s paintings and drawings and other works of art. The Rose Art Museum is the final venue for Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love; previous venues included the Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii, and the Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, Florida. The exhibition was organized by and debuted at the Baltimore Museum of Art and curated by Dr. Asma Naeem, Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Acclaimed writers Evan Moffitt and Hanya Yangagihara contributed essays to the exhibition’s accompanying illustrated catalogue. Toor’s distinctive style combines historical motifs with contemporary moments to create imaginative new worlds for the 21st century. Salman Toor’s sumptuous and insightful figurative paintings depict intimate, quotidian moments in the lives of fictional young, brown, queer men ensconced in contemporary cosmopolitan culture. His work oscillates between heartening and harrowing, seductive and poignant, inviting and eerie.