Salman Toor Takes His Seat at the Courtauld

The New York painter hangs his work alongside the European masters who shaped him.

Salman Toor has spent years studying European old masters, particularly painters such as Vermeer and Bruegel, and referencing them in his own work. Now 19 of his recent paintings are on view at the Courtauld, nalongside works from the museum’s collection that have shaped his practice.

Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)

In one of his many trips to Paris, Toor saw Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) at the Courtauld. Manet’s last major painting before his death places a female barmaid at its centre, while a large gold-framed mirror behind her reflects an animated Parisian nightlife. In response, Toor painted The Bar on East 13th in 2019, replacing the barmaid with a South Asian queer bartender with long braids, surrounded by a city’s nightlife.

Toor said the work, painted in his characteristic green palette, “helped me paint my way into a community in New York City; it was also like coming out through painting.”

That act of substitution is characteristic of Toor’s wider practice. He uses art history as a framework for depicting the social worlds he knows, borrowing compositions, gestures and figures from European painting and recasting them through the experiences of queer life. 

The Bar on East 13th is now one room away from A Bar at the Folies-Bergère as part of Salman Toor: Someone Like You, which runs at the Courtauld Gallery until January 10, 2027. 

Fag Puddle and Carrier

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, and living in New York since 2002, Toor continues to study European painting made from the Renaissance onwards, including works in the Courtauld’s collection. For the exhibition, he was commissioned to make a new work and found his starting point in another of the museum’s paintings: Lorenzo Lotto’s The Entombment (1550–55), in which the Italian artist gathers mourners tightly around Christ’s body, their arms and torsos forming a compressed field of grief.

According to curator Elena Crippa, the subject spoke to Toor in the context of the current geopolitical climate of war and conflict. His Fag Puddle with Carriers (2026) recalls Lotto’s compressed arrangement, with three men carrying a bundle of body parts through a dark, green-lit interior. Toor has previously made several works around the motif, describing the “fag puddles” as “stories about fracturing – a camp comedy of parts and things that don’t quite make sense,” connected to the experience of being queer.

While Toor’s figures and scenes are fictional, they are rooted in personal experiences and memories. He describes his paintings as depicting “queer and immigrant lives that straddle different cultures and inhabit the tension between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement. What it means to find a community, but also the daily costs associated with visibility”.

Green is a recurring device in these scenes. Toor uses it to make familiar places feel uncertain: someone waiting at a door, a man alone at a bar, friends collapsing together after a night out. In his nocturnal paintings, the colour also recalls the green associated with absinthe and the cafés, bars and night scenes of late-19th-century Paris, where drinking and nightlife could suggest pleasure, intoxication and social ambiguity. Toor brings something of that atmosphere into contemporary queer nightlife, using colour to make ordinary social spaces feel heightened and slightly unreal.

Ghost Ball

His references extend beyond European art. Ghost Ball (2023), one of the larger paintings in the exhibition, takes its dancing figures from an 18th-century Indian painting attributed to Pandit Seu.

Toor’s dialogue with art history can sometimes be almost literal. Three Mascots (2023), included in the Courtauld’s drawings display, reworks Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Three Soldiers (1568), retaining the old master’s trio of overlapping male figures and their theatrical gestures while replacing his mercenary soldiers with contemporary, ambiguous performers.

Salman Toor: Someone Like You is accompanied by a display of hit works on paper and places Toor’s contemporary scenes of queer and immigrant life within the longer history of painting, while drawing on his sustained engagement with the Courtauld’s collection, from Renaissance religious painting to 19th-century scenes of modern life. it is a missed opportunity, however, that the paintings Toor references are not installed alongside his own, leaving visitors to make some of those connections for themselves.