Salman Toor Makes His European Debut at the Courtauld, Where Queer Brown Nightlife Meets Manet’s Bar

Salman Toor paints the buzz of a night out and the quiet that comes after it. On Oct. 2, London got its first proper look. Salman Toor: Someone Like You is his first solo exhibition in Europe, 19 paintings made since 2019 and never shown in Britain, at the Courtauld Gallery in Somerset House.

Toor, who was born in Lahore in 1983 and lives in New York, paints young, queer South Asian men in tender, sensual scenes of city life, and the Courtauld is a pointed host. Its own collection holds Édouard Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” the painting Toor nods to in “The Bar on 13th Street” (2019), where a bartender wears braids, a gold bangle and nail polish. In “Bar Boy” (2019), a young man’s face glows from his phone in a crowded East Village club. “Museum Boys” (2021) borrows Vermeer’s dandyish fashion and drops in a Duchamp-like inverted urinal.

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There is a heavier thread too. A series Toor began in 2019 follows immigrants at border control, and “Ghost Ball” (2023), one of his largest paintings, lent by the Pinault Collection, shows figures dancing to musicians, inspired by an 18th-century Indian painting, “Dancing Villagers.” Key loans also come from the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the National Gallery of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Dallas Museum of Art.

Toor says the paintings “depict queer and immigrant lives that straddle different cultures and inhabit the tension between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement.”

What it means to find a community, but also the daily costs associated with visibility.

Salman Toor, on what the paintings explore, in the Courtauld’s press release, The Courtauld

That mix is why Hypebeast calls his club scenes so lively you can almost hear them, with quieter scenes of alienation never far away. The same piece notes that The New York Times has called him “one of the most fascinating painters of his generation.”

The Courtauld’s Elena Crippa edited the catalogue and curated the show, which follows his first major museum solo at the Whitney in 2020. A separate display of Toor’s drawings sits on a lower floor. Someone Like You runs in the Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries through Jan. 10, 2027.

Added to the High Grailed archive on October 11, 2026.