Salman Toor

Painter Salman Toor depicts scenes of queer, urban life in figurative paintings that explore desires and hopes particular to his own personal history of immigration. Toor’s slight, vaguely passive figures are at home in his compositional worlds of narrow bars and sparse apartments. They are also comfortable within themselves and their otherness, despite the occasionally inconveniencing threats of authority and conventional displays of masculinity, which loom at the edges of Toor’s canvases or presumably stand out of frame, enforcing an immigration or customs check under airport lighting. Toor’s paintings are performances of empowered self-representation: mythologizations of social environments and mundane moments replete with empathy, kindness, and tenderness.