Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love

No Ordinary Love is Salman Toor’s (b. 1983, Pakistan) first museum exhibition in the Pacific region. The show features approximately 40 recent paintings and works on paper in the artist’s unique style of contemporary genre painting. 

Weaving together contemporary scenes with historical motifs drawn from European, American, and South Asian artistic traditions, Toor’s work tells stories of family life, queer desire, and immigrant experience. Toor lives and works in New York City but grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, where he was born. Working from this perspective, his paintings center Brown, queer figures, and reflect on power and sexuality in shifting cultural environments. 

Using a signature palette of rich emerald greens, Toor’s paintings are infused with 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. 

The exhibition is organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art, and curated by Asma Naeem, the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog that includes essays by Naeem, writer Evan Moffitt, as well as a short story by acclaimed author Hanya Yanagihara, who grew up in Honolulu. 

Supported by

Top banner
Salman Toor. Walking Together, 2019 (detail). Oil on panel. Private collection, New York. © Salman Toor; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. Photos by Farzad Owrang. 

Artist Talk: Salman Toor in Conversation

Art Talk: Asma Naeem: Salman Toor’s Brown Boys