Salman Toor | Wound & Happy Servant & Resident Alien & Time After Time

A contemporary American painter of African American and South Asian descent who lives in Weston, Connecticut, Mequitta Ahuja casts herself as mythic warriors, epic heroes, and power figures descending from traditions across cultures. She synthesizes her multicultural heritage into works that evoke the process of identity construction.

In his latest paintings, Salman Toor meditates on his life as a gay artist who divides his time between two diametrically opposite communities: New York, where he can live and love openly, and his hometown of Lahore, Pakistan, where the dictates of family and religion demand that he suppress his identity.

New York-based artist Salman Toor’s brushstrokes place young queer brown men in scenes of love, friendship, and solitude in his luscious oil paintings. In Time After Time, his ongoing exhibition at Aicon Gallery in Manhattan, he challenges the systematic exclusion of queer men of color from art history. Here, his figures claim the foreground with their bodies, donning flamboyant attires over their delicate physiques. The artist’s dandy types nonchalantly sip cocktails, zealously sway to music, or lazily lounge in their downtown apartments. Beauty, vulnerability, and power shines through each painting.

In a year marked by migration and displacement, artists at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016 frame the idea of home and away.

Pakistanis have many many talents. Stalking, creeping and making up the most absurd things about other people. But other than that there are Pakistanis with real talent and they deserve as much of our attention for hustling and making themselves a name with their insane creativity.
Here’s our jaw-dropping list of amazing Pakistani artists that NEED to be followed right now.

Salman Toor is the best kind of contemporary painter: funny, insightful, and not afraid to get personal. His colorful, figurative images are both intimate and relatable, featuring crowds of people engaging in romantic or imaginative adventures, filled with references to the artist’s many travels and international background.

New York City has facilitated my cobbling together of seemingly divergent understandings of developing societies seething in turmoil, along with the microcosms of cultures like Brooklyn’s art scene. Since I left Lahore, my work has developed in more abstract directions in order to host and superimpose imagined narratives and homelands in which personal and global concerns intersect.

Salman Toor’s insular scenes of life in Pakistan have vanished. Instead ghosts, hobos, poets, exiles, counts, ascetics, rabble-rousers, vagrants, and partygoers inhabit a no-man’s-land where time stands still. In Toor’s second solo exhibition at New York’s Aicon Gallery, Resident Alien, an artist possessed by a spirit to experiment and plunge into a new world has emerged.