Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love

Product Information

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?

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love by Salman Toor | Goodreads

Completely. When I graduated from Ohio and moved to New York, there were only a few artists doing it. But I guess, with the culture changing, from 9/11 all the way to BLM and Gen Z, personal stories have become so much more important. Also, with the rise of social media, everyone has to speak for themselves. Those stories, frankly, have changed the conversation in a way that I never thought it could be changed. That is incredible. Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love is a major solo exhibition of work by Pakistani-born artist Salman Toor (b. 1983). Conceived as an enhancement of a traveling exhibition of recent paintings (2020-2022), curated by Dr. Asma Naeem of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Rose presentation will contextualize Toor’s art by installing it in dialogue with relevant pieces from the museum’s stellar permanent collection. The show will also feature Toor’s drawings and notebooks, shedding light on his creative process.Toor’s distinctive style combines historical motifs with contemporary moments to create imaginative new worlds for the 21st century. 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. The Rose Art Museum will host a reception, open to the public, on Thursday, November 16, at 6 p.m. to celebrate the exhibition. A robust slate of programs, including an artist talk, will activate the show during its presentation. Toor makes much of his dual identities: growing up as a queer youth in Lahore, Pakistan, and later moving to New York City. While his work has plenty of softness and whimsy, there are undercurrents of strangeness that verges on the unsettling. Clown noses, marionette strings, and ill-fitted theatrical costumes suggest alienation and the tragic-comic. Figures occasionally stand alone in crowded rooms or are isolated by color and lighting from their fellows. This sense of isolation in one of the most recent works in the show and one of the only works that eschew the human figure: Cemetery with Dog, 2022. The loping, smeared white dog in Cemetery with Dog evokes Francis Bacon’s Study for a Running Dog, c. 1954. Bacon’s mangy dogs also emerged at a moment of cross-cultural alienation, emerging after a trip to South Africa. In both works, the dogs suggest the uncanny realization that the benign and familial can take on an ominous quality when removed from its happy, familiar context.

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love | Baltimore Museum of Art

Toor’s art explores his experiences as a Queer diasporic South Asian man and challenges traditional art historical traditions. 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. The exhibition challenges outdated concepts of power and sexuality, centering Queer figures of color.The Met's Libraries and Research Centers provide unparalleled resources for research and welcome an international community of students and scholars. Toor has described that his work is concerned with various themes, such as the treatment of brown men and young people in public and private spaces and the role of technology in daily life. [18] Curator Ambika Trasi has noted, ”They are ruminations on the identifications variously imposed on and adopted by queer South Asian men living in the diaspora”. [18] In doing so, Trasi has written that Toor aims to include brown men in the art historical canon that is often missing this representation. [18]

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

The exhibition is organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art, and curated by Asma Naeem, Ph.D., the Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog that includes essays by Naeem and writer Evan Moffitt, as well as a short story by acclaimed author Hanya Yanagihara, who grew up in Honolulu. 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). Waltham, Mass. September 2023 – The highly anticipated exhibition, Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, will be open to the public at the Rose Art Museum from November 16, 2023, to February 11, 2024. This remarkable showcase brings together over 45 recent paintings and works on paper by the Pakistan-born, New York-based artist. Toor’s unique ability to blend historical motifs with contemporary moments creates imaginative new worlds for the 21st century. The exhibition explores themes of desire, family, and tradition, while challenging outdated concepts of power and sexuality. Key Takeaways:• Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love features over 45 recent paintings and works on paper by the Pakistan-born artist. 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. 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.a b c d e f g "The Self as Cipher: Salman Toor's Narrative Paintings". whitney.org . Retrieved 2022-02-17. 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.” Your paintings often show moments of fleeting intimacy or connection; there’s often a sense of a threshold being crossed. Why do you keep returning to these brief encounters? 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.” Wilkin, Karen (March 2021). "Salman Toor at the Whitney by Karen Wilkin". newcriterion.com . Retrieved 2021-10-20.

Salman Toor: From Pakistan with Love Juxtapoz Magazine - Salman Toor: From Pakistan with Love

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. The presentation of Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love at the Honolulu Museum of Art forms part of a national tour. GOING DARK: THE CONTEMPORARY FIGURE AT THE EDGE OF VISIBILITY GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM PUBLICATIONS ISBN: 9780892075638 Alessandrini, Christopher (2019-05-18). " 'Boys Do It Better': The Paintings of Louis Fratino". The New York Review of Books . Retrieved 2019-06-13.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.