First solo museum show in Europe by painter Salman Toor, featuring his vivid scenes of queer South Asian life.
Salman Toor has his first solo museum show in Europe at the Courtauld Gallery, running from 2 October 2026 to 10 January 2027. It's held across the Courtauld Gallery and the Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, with a separate display of his drawings running alongside in the Gilbert & Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery.
The main show brings together 19 paintings Toor has worked on since 2019, and none of them have been seen in Britain before. One of the centerpieces is The Bar on East 13th (2019), which revisits the Courtauld's own Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882). The paintings are loans from the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Pinault Collection, and they're accompanied by a new catalogue edited by curator Dr Elena Crippa.
Toor was born in Lahore, Pakistan, trained in the US and now lives and works in New York. He's known for sumptuous figurative work that imagines the private lives of young, brown, queer men. The figures are fictional but rooted in his own experiences and memories, and he describes them as depicting queer and immigrant lives that straddle different cultures and inhabit the tension between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement. His work draws on a wide range of influences: Baroque and 18th-century painting, the Mughal School, photography and graphic novels.
Every week we pick 🏆 the 5 best 🏆 things to do in London and send them to your inbox. Just one weekly email, no spam.
By submitting your email, you accept our Privacy Policy
If you want to dig deeper, there's a study day on Saturday 28 November 2026 led by Dr Elena Crippa and Dr Saul Nelson, costing £50 in-person, £40 for concessions, £10 for the online recording and £5 for concessions. The gallery is open 10:00 to 18:00, with last entry at 17:15, and stays open late until 20:00 on Fridays 2, 6 and 4 December 2026 and 8 January 2027.
