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Queer artists 14/30 - Salman Toor

Salman Toor is a Pakistani-American painting living and working in New York City. His work often depicts candid scenes of queer men in social scenarios such as gays bars and house parties, as well as the experiences of South Asian men in the diaspora. These pieces explore themes of public and private space, the role of technology in modern life, and the treatment of men of colour. Salman’s work often uses bright, saturated colours, with many of them strongly featuring the colour green. He says, “I chose green for aesthetic reasons. There is something nocturnal about it, like night vision. It’s inviting and glamorous, but it has connotations of poisonous gases and potions. But most importantly, I like that it’s not a sentimental color.”

Salman’s work is influenced by both South Asian and Western canons, placing subjects who have typically been marginalised from art history into these canons. His painting The Bar on East 13th, for example, visually references Manet’s A Bar at the Golies-Bergere. He states, “I like these seemingly undernourished and hairy bodies of color inhabiting familiar, bourgeois, urban, interior spaces. I see these boys or men as well-educated, creative types discovering what it means to live an artist’s life in New York City and in the thick of changing ideas about race, immigration, and foreignness, and also what it means to be American. Sometimes they can look like lifestyle images. They are also fantasies about myself and my community.”