Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love

Salman Toor paints young brown queer men in green-lit apartments and airport queues with the compositional manners of Van Dyck and Watteau, and the effect is deliberately unstable: an old-master intimacy applied to lives European painting never had any intention of holding.

Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. with the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2022 for Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, curated by Asma Naeem, then the BMA's chief curator and now its director. The exhibition gathered more than forty-five recent paintings and works on paper, several made for the show in response to seventeenth- to nineteenth-century European pictures in the museum's collection, among them Anthony van Dyck's Rinaldo and Armida of 1629, together with drawings and notebooks. The 144-page volume carries 76 colour plates, essays by Naeem and the critic Evan Moffitt on Toor's formal sources and his handling of desire, family and history, and an original short story by Hanya Yanagihara illustrated with his paintings. Designed by Topos Graphics; the exhibition travelled to the Tampa Museum of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis.

Toor, born in Lahore in 1983 and based in New York, works between the two cities in his subject matter as much as his biography.