Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love

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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.” Leo Kalyan earned his undergraduate degree in England, at King’s College London. Toor stayed with him when he went to London in the summer of 2004. He spent his days at the National Gallery and other museums, but his nights, he said, were “like a crash course in mainstream gay culture.” Kalyan, Sethi, Aijazuddin, and Toor were all dating, but they weren’t dating one another. This changed six years ago, when Sethi and Toor realized that they belonged together. Although they live in different New York apartments, the bond between them is very deep. “I knew I had found the person I wanted to be with for good,” Toor told me. They have all done well in the world. Aijazuddin, who became an artist and a writer, now lives chiefly in New York; Sethi and Kalyan are both singers and songwriters, well known for their innovations in traditional South Asian music. (Sethi’s most recent single, “ Pasoori,” has drawn more than two hundred and ninety million viewers on YouTube.) The four friends continue to keep in touch, talking on the phone or the Internet nearly every day. The exhibition is organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art, and curated by Asma Naeem, Ph.D., the Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog that includes essays by Naeem and writer Evan Moffitt, as well as a short story by acclaimed author Hanya Yanagihara, who grew up in Honolulu. The title of your hit show at the Whitney stole from a Whitney Houston song. Should all exhibition titles be taken from Whitney songs? 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.”

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love | Baltimore Museum of Art

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. For the Rose presentation of No Ordinary Love, the exhibition will be nestled within the museum’s permanent collection, creating formal and thematic dialogues between Toor’s paintings and drawings and other works of art. The Rose Art Museum is the final venue for Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love; previous venues included the Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii, and the Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, Florida. The exhibition was organized by and debuted at the Baltimore Museum of Art and curated by Dr. Asma Naeem, Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Acclaimed writers Evan Moffitt and Hanya Yangagihara contributed essays to the exhibition’s accompanying illustrated catalogue. This gallery pairing feels fresh, but it certainly isn’t unique. The trend to bring contemporary artworks into European collection galleries has been increasing for some time now. Nearby at the Walters Art Museum, the exhibition Activating the Renaissance brings the work of six contemporary artists into the Italian Galleries, juxtaposing them with the museum’s impressive collection of Medieval through Baroque artworks. As museums continue to struggle with ways to make their classical holdings relevant to increasingly socially aware and diverse audiences, this approach promises fruitful results for artists and audiences for many years to come. Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love is organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and curated by Dr. Asma Naeem, Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. The Rose Art Museum presentation is organized by Dr. Gannit Ankori, Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator and Professor of Fine Arts and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University with contributions by Dorian Keeffe, Collections Care and Exhibition Production Assistant. Exchange Show, Montclair University MFA Gallery, Montclair, New Jersey Pratt MFA Thesis Show, Stueben Gallery, Brooklyn [28]

A Glimpse into Toor’s Creative Process

Toor's work is included in such museum collections as the Whitney Museum of American Art [16] and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. [17] Work [ edit ] 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 MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Salman Toor: How Will I Know, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, was recently presented at the Whitney Museum (2020–21). The Rose Art Museum will host a reception, open to the public, on Thursday, November 16, at 6 p.m. to celebrate the exhibition. A robust slate of programs, including an artist talk, will activate the show during its presentation. We are honored to present this riveting exhibition and to provide our audiences with an opportunity to experience Toor’s breathtaking work first-hand,” said Dr. Gannit Ankori, Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator of the Rose Art Museum, who organized the Rose’s presentation of the traveling exhibition. “Toor is a stellar painter and virtuoso draftsman who has created a body of work that is beautiful and profoundly significant. Works like Boys in Bed (2021), recently acquired by the Rose Art Museum, and others in the show are imbued with sensuality, vulnerability, and humor, showcasing the artist’s deep art historical knowledge, spanning European, American, and South Asian traditions.” 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)

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 Open November 16 at Rose Art Museum

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. 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.”

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love’ captures dreamlike encounters ‘Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love’ captures dreamlike encounters

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. 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. 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.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.

Salman Toor became the art name to know - Financial Times How Salman Toor became the art name to know - Financial Times

Stop Play Pause Repeat, Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, Dubai Letters to Taseer II, Drawing Room Gallery, Lahore 2010 [28] 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 MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work organized by and originally presented attheBaltimore Museum of Art, MD in 2022, is currentlyon atthe Honolulu Museum of Art, HI through October 2023, the show was previously on view at the Tampa Museum of Art, FL in spring 2023 and will travel to Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University,Waltham,MAin December 2023.A major solopresentation ofToor’sworkwas also recently on view atMWOOD inBeijingin Winter2023. Stone, Julia (2016). "Reimagining His Roots, East and West". Ohio Wesleyan University . Retrieved 2021-10-20. Waltham, Mass. September 2023 – The highly anticipated exhibition, Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, will be open to the public at the Rose Art Museum from November 16, 2023, to February 11, 2024. This remarkable showcase brings together over 45 recent paintings and works on paper by the Pakistan-born, New York-based artist. Toor’s unique ability to blend historical motifs with contemporary moments creates imaginative new worlds for the 21st century. The exhibition explores themes of desire, family, and tradition, while challenging outdated concepts of power and sexuality. Key Takeaways:• Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love features over 45 recent paintings and works on paper by the Pakistan-born artist.

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Toor’s distinctive style combines historical motifs with contemporary moments to create imaginative new worlds for the 21st century. Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love features more than 45 paintings and works on paper made between 2019 and 2022, that weave together motifs found in historical paintings with recognizable 21st-century moments to create new worlds based in Toor’s imagination. The exhibition captures the ways in which Toor engages with art history to center brown, queer figures and to challenge enshrined notions of power and sexuality.