Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love

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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 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 by Salman Toor (Hardback) Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love by Salman Toor (Hardback)

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.Salman 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 Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Salman Toor: How Will I Know, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, was recently presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2020-21). 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. 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. 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. 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.”

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GOING DARK: THE CONTEMPORARY FIGURE AT THE EDGE OF VISIBILITY GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM PUBLICATIONS ISBN: 9780892075638 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. Wilkin, Karen (March 2021). "Salman Toor at the Whitney by Karen Wilkin". newcriterion.com . Retrieved 2021-10-20. After high-school football stars were accused of rape, online vigilantes demanded that justice be served.Toor said that when he was an art student “there were only four or five people doing what you do”—meaning figurative paintings of real people. “There was you, and—” We aimed to echo his sensibilities through a soft gender-neutral palette and the use of the typeface Epicene. This display typeface manages to be elegant and flamboyant while still reading as elevated and, perhaps, proper. 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]

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love by Salman Toor | Goodreads

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. The exhibition challenges outdated concepts of power and sexuality, centering Queer figures of color. Toor’s art traces a wide swath of art history to resonate in the present,” wrote Naeem in the catalog’s foreword. “Within these many narrative threads, we are achingly aware of two fundamental and entwined human truths: we all want to see clearly and to be seen clearly.” 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.

A Glimpse into Toor’s Creative Process

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