Salman Toor’s first solo exhibition in Europe brings nineteen paintings of friendship, nightlife and border crossings to the gallery that holds the Manet he quotes.
Painter Salman Toor shows Someone Like You, his first solo exhibition in Europe, at The Courtauld Gallery on the Strand from Friday 2 October 2026 to Sunday 10 January 2027. His paintings imagine the lives of young, queer South Asian men in New York.
Toor was born in Lahore in 1983 and moved to the United States in 2002 to study painting at Ohio Wesleyan University. He took his postgraduate degree at the Pratt Institute in 2009 and stayed in New York.
His breakthrough came in 2020 and 2021, when the Whitney Museum of American Art gave him his first museum solo show, How Will I Know. They draw on Baroque and eighteenth-century painting, the Mughal School and graphic novels.
The 19 paintings were all made since 2019. A series begun in 2019 turns to border control, from Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug to Citizens.
Ghost Ball, from 2023, answers Dancing Villagers, an Indian painting of about 1730 attributed to Pandit Seu.
The Bar on East 13th reworks Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, which hangs in the Courtauld’s own collection. His drawings fill the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery alongside.