Courtauld Gallery · West End
Salman Toor: Someone Like You
The New York painter's first European solo museum show, around 20 paintings exploring queer and immigrant life, with a companion drawings display.
In The Bar on East 13th (2019), the bartender wears braids, nail polish, ribbons and a gold bangle. Toor painted it after seeing Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère at the Courtauld in 2017, and now it hangs in the building that owns the Manet.
This is the New York painter's first solo museum show in Europe: 19 paintings, all made since 2019, on Floor 3. There are green-lit bar and party scenes, a series on border control in which a man waits head down while an official goes through his face creams and phone plug, and Ghost Ball (2023), one of his largest canvases, based on an 18th-century Indian painting of dancing villagers. A separate display of his drawings is in the Drawings Gallery.
The figures are invented but drawn from Toor's own life: queer, South Asian, living between Lahore and New York. Friday lates run until 20:00 on 2 October, 6 November, 4 December and 8 January.
Coup de cœur de la rédaction
Dix-neuf peintures de jeunes hommes sud-asiatiques, entourés de leurs amis et de leurs amants, dans la première exposition personnelle de Toor dans un musée européen. The Bar on East 13th transpose à New York Un bar aux Folies-Bergère de Manet ; le tableau de Manet est accroché à quelques salles de là.
À ne pas manquer
The Bar on East 13th
Toor's answer to the Courtauld's own Manet, with a bartender in braids and painted nails.
Bar Boy
On loan from the Whitney, a young man in a packed East Village club, his face lit only by his phone.
Museum Boys
Two dandies in a pearl earring and buckled hat study a vitrine holding a pink shoe, a sleeping half-naked man and an upside-down urinal.
Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug
From the border-control series: a traveller waits, head bowed, while his belongings are laid out for inspection.
Ghost Ball
One of his biggest paintings, lent by the Pinault Collection, with figures dancing to musicians after an 18th-century Indian court painting.
Idéal pour
- Visites en soirée
- Proches de passage
