Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love

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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 The exhibition explores themes of desire, family, and tradition, while challenging outdated concepts of power and sexuality.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. I am an aspirational minimalist, and I fail at it, but I keep trying. I’m a hoarder, but I like to organise. I actually cleaned last night, and I’m in a very organised apartment right now – it’s just giving me shivers of pleasure to walk around it. 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.

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love by Salman Toor | Goodreads

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. 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. 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.

The title of your hit show at the Whitney stole from a Whitney Houston song. Should all exhibition titles be taken from Whitney songs? Parts and Things,” a green painting of sundry items of clothing and body parts piled on the floor of a closet, previewed Toor’s semi-abstract “Fag Puddle” series. In “Sleeping Boy,” a young man who resembles Toor lies on white sheets so lusciously painted that they look edible, his face and his naked body illuminated by light from an open laptop. Toor’s virtuoso handling of paint brings the images to life, and the stories they tell, whether simple or complex, catch and engage viewers’ attention. The Whitney show launched Toor as an international art star, a role that he has no intention of playing. He joined the Luhring Augustine gallery in 2020, but instead of doubling or tripling his prices on the primary market Toor and the gallery agreed to keep them relatively low and increase them gradually. “I don’t want a big, intimidating number to enter my head while I’m in the studio,” he said to me. “That would really destroy the process.” Smith, Roberta (2020-12-23). "Salman Toor, a Painter at Home in Two Worlds". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2021-10-20. Stop Play Pause Repeat, Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, Dubai Letters to Taseer II, Drawing Room Gallery, Lahore 2010 [28] 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 - Medium Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love - Medium

Toor said, “ I like these… bodies of color inhabiting familiar, bourgeois, urban, interior spaces… Sometimes they can look like lifestyle images. They are also fantasies about myself and my community.” 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. No Ordinary Love captures the ways in which Toor upends art historical traditions to center brown, queer figures and to investigate outdated concepts of power and sexuality. The exhibition will also include a selection of the artist’s sketchbooks. The museum has been a favorite among students in the surrounding universities of Loyola, Johns Hopkins, and Towson, as it is within walking distance and admission is always free. It is the largest art museum in Baltimore, with a connecting sculpture garden, allowing for hours of artistic exploration through many mediums and forms. Currin looked at Toor. “I have bad news,” he said. “You use a lot of green, and there are guys’ asses. Learn now to hang drywalls is all I’ve got to say.”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.