Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love

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Murphy, Peter (2021-02-02). "Salman Toor: How Will I Know". The Brooklyn Rail . Retrieved 2021-10-20. Exchange Show, Montclair University MFA Gallery, Montclair, New Jersey Pratt MFA Thesis Show, Stueben Gallery, Brooklyn [28] Using a signature palette of rich emerald greens, Toor’s paintings are infused with both melancholy and glamour. These moody depictions amplify small moments of existence, blending vulnerability, desire, violence and celebration in compositions based on Toor’s imagination. Vivid brushstrokes radiate throughout the canvas, creating an atmospheric distance that suggests both intimacy and isolation. 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. 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.

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love - Topos Graphics Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love - Topos Graphics

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. Raiannamei Elad ‘23 said, “He merges his different identities through his art in a way that is compelling and beautiful to the audience. You can feel the turmoil and conflict he experienced but also how much growth has occurred when he accepted who he is.” 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. 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.

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.” I grew up in a homophobic culture; I went to an all-boys’ prep school, and I also grew up in a pretty conservative, culturally Muslim family. There was zero visibility of forms of affection in public spaces. So yes, for me to do these paintings is to be on the verge of a threshold. But there’s another kind of threshold I’ve crossed in the near-20 years I’ve spent in New York. In 2006, when I came here from Ohio, this was a post-9/11 country, so there wasn’t any of the Gen Z discussion about gender or misogyny, things like that. The culture changed, and I changed. I felt like I’d been doing paintings that were very, very academic, and I wasn’t really interested in contemporary art. But I was skirting around the more meaningful things in my life, which was the struggle to be out, to make connections between the culture in which I was born and the culture that I have adopted, and the friendships that mean everything to me. So I decided to do other work in the studio. It was just bursting out of me. 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: From Pakistan with Love Juxtapoz Magazine - Salman Toor: From Pakistan with Love

Wilkin, Karen (March 2021). "Salman Toor at the Whitney by Karen Wilkin". newcriterion.com . Retrieved 2021-10-20. Feinstein mentioned that her mother had recently met Toor on a flight to Miami. “The plane had landed,” Toor explained. “We were waiting to move out, and a lady across the aisle was talking to her seatmate about her daughter, Rachel, an artist who was married to an artist, and I had to say something.” The Rose Art Museum fosters community, experimentation, and scholarship through direct engagement with modern and contemporary art, artists, and ideas. Founded in 1961, the Rose is among the nation’s preeminent university art museums and houses one of New England's most extensive collections of modern and contemporary art. Through its exceptional collection, support of emerging artists, and innovative programming, the Museum serves as a nexus for art and social justice at Brandeis University and beyond. Located just 20 minutes from downtown Boston, the Rose Art Museum is open Wednesdays–Sundays, 11 AM–5 PM. Admission is free. Toor’s works invert historical traditions in art and feature queer and brown individuals as a way to explore outdated concepts of power and the way in which it is presented through art. Toor was born in Pakistan, and his works are a mesh of his religious upbringing as well as his sexuality. Toor looks to give representation to individuals that are otherwise missing from historical art canon. “No Ordinary Love” is a vibrant proclamation of love depicted in various ways. 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.”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. 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.

Salman Toor Left the Old Masters Behind | The New Yorker How Salman Toor Left the Old Masters Behind | The New Yorker

The Met's Libraries and Research Centers provide unparalleled resources for research and welcome an international community of students and scholars. The Rose Art Museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays and on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day. 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.” Salman Toor (born 1983) is a Pakistani painter based in the United States. His works depict the imagined lives of young men of South Asian-birth, displayed in close range in either South Asia and New York City fantasized settings. [1] Toor lives and works in New York City. Toor’s distinctive style combines historical motifs with contemporary moments to create imaginative new worlds for the 21st century.GOING DARK: THE CONTEMPORARY FIGURE AT THE EDGE OF VISIBILITY GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM PUBLICATIONS ISBN: 9780892075638 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. 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 is only one of the contemporary artists that the museum has featured in recent years. The BMA invites contemporary artists to reinterpret the historical works that are held within its walls. The museum itself has a curated collection of works that span from ancient Egypt and other ancient civilizations, to the Renaissance, the Impressionist movement, to more contemporary pieces today. 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.

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love by Salman Toor | Goodreads

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love is organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and curated by Dr. Asma Naeem, Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. The Rose Art Museum presentation is organized by Dr. Gannit Ankori, Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator and Professor of Fine Arts and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University with contributions by Dorian Keeffe, Collections Care and Exhibition Production Assistant.

Stone, Julia (2016). "Reimagining His Roots, East and West". Ohio Wesleyan University . Retrieved 2021-10-20. a b c d e f g "The Self as Cipher: Salman Toor's Narrative Paintings". whitney.org . Retrieved 2022-02-17. The presentation of Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love at the Honolulu Museum of Art forms part of a national tour. We are honored to present this riveting exhibition and to provide our audiences with an opportunity to experience Toor’s breathtaking work first-hand,” said Dr. Gannit Ankori, Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator of the Rose Art Museum, who organized the Rose’s presentation of the traveling exhibition. “Toor is a stellar painter and virtuoso draftsman who has created a body of work that is beautiful and profoundly significant. Works like Boys in Bed (2021), recently acquired by the Rose Art Museum, and others in the show are imbued with sensuality, vulnerability, and humor, showcasing the artist’s deep art historical knowledge, spanning European, American, and South Asian traditions.” No Ordinary Love captures how Toor upends art historical traditions to center brown, queer figures and to investigate outdated concepts of power and sexuality. In his paintings, Toor captures moments of intimacy and tenderness between family members, friends, and lovers.