Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love

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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 Toor’s distinct hybrid compositions center Queer figures of color and reconsider outdated concepts of power and sexuality. 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Love captures the ways in which Toor upends art historical traditions to center brown, queer figures and to investigate outdated concepts of power and sexuality.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. As part of the Met's Open Access policy, you can freely copy, modify and distribute this image, even for commercial purposes. API 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.

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love - ARTBOOK|D.A.P.

Salman Toor was born in 1983 in Lahore,Pakistan. He attended Aitchison College. [2] Toor came to the United States to attend school at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2006. [3] He then obtained his MFA degree from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2009. [4] 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.” Living in his native Lahore, Toor became deeply knowledgeable about the works of modern Pakistani and Indian painters. Parallel to this, he studied old European masters, avidly copying works by Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and others. Painting distinct hybrid compositions using his brilliant textural brushstrokes and bold ‘Emerald Green’ palette, Toor explores his experiences as a Queer diasporic South Asian man, creating imaginative new worlds for the 21st century. 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.Exchange Show, Montclair University MFA Gallery, Montclair, New Jersey Pratt MFA Thesis Show, Stueben Gallery, Brooklyn [28] 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.” When Toor graduated from Ohio Wesleyan, in 2006, he went to New York. Komail Aijazuddin was still at N.Y.U., living in a two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, and Toor and Ali Sethi, who had just graduated from Harvard, moved in with him. Toor got a job in the marketing department of a now defunct art magazine. It was the only job he ever had. “Within a couple of months, I felt like I was wasting my time,” he told me. “I didn’t have any time to paint, so I just stopped. I applied to a bunch of grad schools, and got into Pratt. Incredibly, my father decided to pay for it. I did tell him that this level of education would make it easier for me to make a living. But I’m still surprised. 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.”

Salman Toor | Fag Puddle with Candle, Shoe, and Flag | The Salman Toor | Fag Puddle with Candle, Shoe, and Flag | The

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.”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.

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love | Baltimore Museum of Art Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love | Baltimore Museum of Art

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. It was a warmish night in early May. The house has five floors, and there are Currin paintings on almost every wall. A larger-than-life sculpture by Feinstein, of the Italian clown Punchinello and his family, fills the entrance hall. When Toor arrived, wearing a loose, saffron-colored linen shirt over matching pants, Feinstein showed him around. “These are portraits of the kids that John’s been doing over the years,” she said. “This is one of me when I was thirty—before the kids. Now my portraits look like I’m angry.” Toor recognized almost every painting by name, from reproductions he’d seen. Currin joined us in the sitting room, and shook hands with Toor. They sat down near a blazing fire. “John wants the drama of fires even when it’s a thousand degrees outside,” Feinstein explained. “He turns up the air-conditioning beforehand.” 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 Wilkin, Karen (March 2021). "Salman Toor at the Whitney by Karen Wilkin". newcriterion.com . Retrieved 2021-10-20. 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.

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. A vital part of Hawaiʻi’s cultural landscape, HoMA is a unique gathering place where art, global worldviews, culture and education converge in the heart of Honolulu. In addition to an internationally renowned permanent collection, the museum houses innovative exhibitions, an art school, an independent art house theatre, a café and a museum shop within one of the most beautiful, iconic buildings in Hawaiʻi. The exhibition challenges outdated concepts of power and sexuality, centering Queer figures of color.