Image: Courtauld Gallery, London
The Courtauld Gallery has announced ‘Salman Toor: Someone Like You’, the first solo exhibition in Europe by the New York-based painter Salman Toor. The show will run from 2 October 2026 to 10 January 2027 in the Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, bringing together 19 paintings described by the gallery as some of the artist’s most iconic, thought-provoking and at times humorous works, never before seen in Britain.
Toor, who was born in Lahore in 1983 and lives and works in New York, is presented by the Courtauld as an artist whose paintings focus on contemporary experience and cosmopolitan urban life. The exhibition is framed around human interactions and the desire and struggle to experience belonging, both culturally and emotionally. According to the gallery, the works show people in shared moments of friendship and love, as well as in solitude and alienation.
The exhibition material also places Toor’s painting practice in relation to his personal experience and memory. The gallery says the figures and scenes are fictional but rooted in those experiences, and it quotes Toor describing the works as depicting “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”. Toor’s first institutional solo exhibition was at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2020–21, and he later took part in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2024.
The Courtauld is also highlighting Toor’s relationship to art history, particularly Baroque and 18th-century painting, and notes that one of the principal works in the exhibition, ‘The Bar on East 13th’ (2019), revisits Édouard Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère’ (1882). The artist’s engagement with the Old Masters is positioned as part of the exhibition’s broader interest in how his paintings combine modern urban scenes with references to earlier painting traditions.
Alongside the main exhibition, the Courtauld will present ‘Salman Toor: Drawings’ in the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery on Floor 1. This focused display runs on the same dates, from 2 October 2026 to 10 January 2027, and includes a substantial group of works on paper made with ink, charcoal and gouache. The gallery says the display will show how drawing informs Toor’s practice as a painter.
The drawings presentation includes ‘Fag Puddle in Vitrine’ (2021), which the Courtauld acquired in 2024 with support from The Garcia Family Foundation. The gallery says Toor’s drawings feature recurring motifs, including border control checks and still-lifes, and that some works rework historical paintings into new narratives and compositions. It cites ‘Three Mascots’ (2023), after Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s grisaille ‘The Three Soldiers’ (1568), as one such example. Tickets for the exhibition are on sale now, advance booking is recommended, and Courtauld Members can attend for free.
