Salman Toor makes more than the sum of his influences at The Courtauld Gallery
The Courtauld is characteristically self-referential in Salman Toor’s first European solo exhibition, Someone Like You. They picked the right man for the job.
Tien Albert
During Wayne Thiebaud’s retrospective at The Courtauld Gallery this time last year, curator Dr Karren Serres compared a rather unassuming still-life of a butcher’s meat counter to Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergères, located just across the exhibition’s walls on Somerset House’s third floor. This year, Salman Toor’s The Bar on East 13th, compositionally almost identical to the famous 19th century Modernist work, requires less piecing together from the viewer's behalf.
A renewed focus on contemporaneity is fitting for The Courtauld, which is building up to the opening of the new Contemporary Galleries, expected to open in 2029 following a £10 million gift by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. But whilst this space will aim to be “championing original practice”, most of the work precursing it seems more intent on looking back to the past. Ella Walker’s Courtauld Commission last month was presented through the lens of its similarities to Boticelli’s Trinity with Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist two floors above, and Rachel Jones’ commission the year before through (slightly tenuous) links to Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear.
For Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at The Courtauld (and curator of the Toor exhibition) Dr Elena Crippa, this is an unfair criticism. “You would never look at a film that is coming out and is making a reference to Hitchcock and go like, ‘that’s dumb’, it’s just what artists do. This is the language of art.” Whilst she acknowledges Toor’s work has been placed in conversation with The Courtauld’s collection akin to other recent exhibits, Dr Crippa emphasises it is relevant in its own right: “I don’t find anything gimmicky about how Salman practices, I think the work is very fresh now.”
Indeed, Toor’s scattered references throughout the exhibition are more transformative than derivative. Moving past The Bar on East 13th, which substitutes Manet’s suspended trapeze artist in the top left for a suspended potted succulent plant, Toor continues to playfully invert works from the Western Art Historical canon. In Museum Boys, two naked men, one of whose wonderfully explicit bum is put on show, are contorted to fit within a museum display case. Resting on top of them is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain urinal, which appears to have been used by at least one of the men. Standing upright by their feet is what looks to be a bottle of poppers, a party inhalant commonly taken by gay men.
Toor embraces his own queerness throughout the show. In The Women, a painting Toor has said is a particularly important story for him to tell, a young boy ignores three women lying down on a bed behind him to consider himself in the mirror, experiencing his own sexual awakening.
Toor’s Southeast Asian identity is equally at play, with several works dedicated to capturing the experience of going through border control. Against a sobering grey colour palette, much opposed to the sharp yet comforting green that makes up many of Toor’s backdrops, a man stands dejected with his possessions sprawled out on the table in front of him. From this perspective, we feel the man’s dehumanisation whilst simultaneously taking on the position of immigration officer.
Just 43 years old (pretty young as far as popular artists go), Toor takes the time to have fun. In Three Friends in a Cab the city blares past the viewer, much to the indifference of the friends in question, who are enthralled in their conversation- and in someone’s phone, a theme that comes up again and again in the gallery. In The Joke, one work along, four diners double-down in laughter and merriment in a fancy restaurant, much to the disappointment of the very unimpressed waiter at their table. Experiencing these paintings feels like an invitation to a moment, an impression only aided by Toor’s rapid and impermanent brushtrokes.
The Courtauld struggles to keep up with Toor’s most serious work. Fag Puddle with Carriers, which features three men carrying body parts in a candlelight vigil, is accompanied by a vague wall label noting that their “clothing suggests a contemporary setting that resonates with current events and the documentation of war and conflict in the media.” Toor himself has been less shy, recently painting a portrait of Mahmoud Khalil, a student at Columbia University who was detained and almost deported from the US for pro-Palestine speech.
Still, platforming an artist like Toor, feels like a step in the right direction. And if The Courtauld’s self-referentiality is a sign to come for what is to come in the Contemporary Galleries, viewers won’t have regurgitated art tropes and motifs to fear. Transformed here, they are more powerful than ever before.
Someone Like You is on display at The Courtauld Gallery until January 10th, 2027.
