Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love

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Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love is a captivating exhibition featuring over 45 recent paintings and works on paper by Pakistan-born artist Salman Toor. The exhibition, on view at the Rose Art Museum from November 16, 2023, to February 11, 2024, explores Toor’s experiences as a Queer diasporic South Asian man. Through his unique blending of historical motifs with contemporary moments, Toor creates imaginative new worlds that challenge outdated concepts of power and sexuality. The exhibition also showcases Toor’s sketchbooks, offering insight into his creative process. Don’t miss this opportunity to experience Toor’s breathtaking work firsthand.• Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love presents over 45 recent paintings and works on paper by the Pakistan-born artist. 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: No Ordinary Love, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work organized by and originally presented attheBaltimore Museum of Art, MD in 2022, is currentlyon atthe Honolulu Museum of Art, HI through October 2023, the show was previously on view at the Tampa Museum of Art, FL in spring 2023 and will travel to Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University,Waltham,MAin December 2023.A major solopresentation ofToor’sworkwas also recently on view atMWOOD inBeijingin Winter2023. Stone, Julia (2016). "Reimagining His Roots, East and West". Ohio Wesleyan University . Retrieved 2021-10-20. 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.

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love | Tampa Museum of Art

At Aitchison College, a boys-only institution, built by the British when Pakistan was part of India and Britain ruled the subcontinent, Toor’s femininity made him the butt of teasing and bullying. Every day, students followed him down the halls, talking in high voices and imitating his swinging gait—“sashaying,” as he calls it. There were a few occasions when he was pushed around and roughed up, but nobody ever hated him, and things improved in the middle school at Aitchison, when his ability to draw brought him respect and admiration. “A lot of kids completely changed their mind about who I was,” he said. Older students asked him to make nude portraits of their imagined girlfriends. The whole school became aware of Toor when he turned sixteen and took the O-level exams—an imperial tradition (they’re now officially known as I.G.C.S.E.s)—and earned world distinction, scoring in the one-hundredth percentile in art. “Salman was prodigiously talented,” Komail Aijazuddin, one of his schoolmates, told me. “He knew light and shape in a way that was almost irritatingly intuitive.” It’s a continuation. I have been thinking of doing things like video, so we might see something like that. And I am finishing a graphic novel that I started with a friend seven years ago. I like the medium of painting, but the stories in the painting are equally important to me. Exchange Show, Montclair University MFA Gallery, Montclair, New Jersey Pratt MFA Thesis Show, Stueben Gallery, Brooklyn [28] The title of your hit show at the Whitney stole from a Whitney Houston song. Should all exhibition titles be taken from Whitney songs? Toor explained that a few years ago he had started looking for new solutions to the way he was thinking. “I wanted to have parts of the painting that responded to my need for realism, and other parts that were deliberately sketchlike and a bit irreverent,” he said. The solution came unexpectedly in 2016. Toor was living in an East Village apartment that he had rented when Atiya left for Canada. He had never wanted his own work in places where he lived, but for a while he hung some of the new, “straightforward” paintings on the walls of his apartment. These were the images that came out of his head, without fine-art sources. “I’ll just paint whatever I feel like,” he told me he had decided. “I’m not going to ban anything. And what I ended up doing were very simple, illustrative, graphic-novel-like images.” He painted himself and his friends at dinner tables and bars, on front stoops and street corners. The figures are realistic but not entirely so. He painted them directly on the canvas, with no preliminary drawings or sketches. “I draw with the brush,” he said. “I didn’t want to plan.” (He jots down visual ideas for paintings in small notebooks, using a ballpoint pen, but when he starts a new painting he works from memory or from invention.) His new paintings were small, and they didn’t take very long to do. “I was thinking less about how to play with form and more about what I urgently needed to paint,” he said. “When I put a group of these pictures together on a wall, they did create a cloud of meaning, so I started going more and more in that direction.”

Major support for this exhibition is provided by the Further Forward Foundation in memory of Jennifer Combs, with additional support from Adam Green, Beth Marcus, Lance Renner, and the Green Family Art Foundation. The inclusion of a variety of works aligns with the museum’s mission statement, which says: “This belief is that art is at the heart of the BMA…with a commitment to artistic excellence and social equity in every decision from art presentation, interpretation, and collecting… creating a museum welcoming to all.”

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HONOLULU— The Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA) presents the Pacific region’s debut of rising star Salman Toor (b. 1983, Pakistan) in Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love. On view July 13-Oct. 8, the exhibition features approximately 40 recent paintings and works on paper in the artist’s unique style of contemporary genre painting. There was talk about the art market and how you could avoid paying astronomic prices for Old Master paintings. “You can get things if there’s a penis, or a naked man’s butt,” Feinstein said. “And, if there’s a lot of the color green, they’re affordable.” 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? No! I had a show in New York called Time after Time, and then I used a Sade title for my show at the Baltimore Museum: No Ordinary Love. I’ve done Sade, I’ve done Whitney… Maybe I should do Mariah? Actually, for the Chinese show they wanted me to do another song title, and I said: I’m done. So it’s just called New Paintings and Drawings.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. Displaying Salman Toor's distinct hybrid compositions, "Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love" explores the artist's experiences as a Queer diasporic South Asian man, creating imaginative new worlds for the 21st century. Leo Kalyan earned his undergraduate degree in England, at King’s College London. Toor stayed with him when he went to London in the summer of 2004. He spent his days at the National Gallery and other museums, but his nights, he said, were “like a crash course in mainstream gay culture.” Kalyan, Sethi, Aijazuddin, and Toor were all dating, but they weren’t dating one another. This changed six years ago, when Sethi and Toor realized that they belonged together. Although they live in different New York apartments, the bond between them is very deep. “I knew I had found the person I wanted to be with for good,” Toor told me. They have all done well in the world. Aijazuddin, who became an artist and a writer, now lives chiefly in New York; Sethi and Kalyan are both singers and songwriters, well known for their innovations in traditional South Asian music. (Sethi’s most recent single, “ Pasoori,” has drawn more than two hundred and ninety million viewers on YouTube.) The four friends continue to keep in touch, talking on the phone or the Internet nearly every day. Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love is an extraordinary exhibition that will be on display at the Rose Art Museum from November 16, 2023. This exhibition brings together more than 45 recent paintings and works on paper by the Pakistan-born artist, Salman Toor. Through his art, Toor explores his experiences as a Queer diasporic South Asian man, creating imaginative new worlds that challenge traditional notions of power and sexuality. The exhibition also features Toor’s sketchbooks, offering a unique glimpse into his creative process. Exploring Themes of Desire, Family, and Tradition 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.