Vulnerability and compassion are twin currents that flow throughout Salman Toor’s artistic practice. Within public spaces and private realms, his protagonists exude a palpable human fragility and profound emotional tenderness that invites us to share in each character’s happiness and joy while also bearing witness to their sorrow and pain. His paintings and drawings convey something of the tensions and thresholds of the human experience, pasts wash over the present, places inform and influence each other, and power edges around moments of pleasure. In doing so, Toor imagines an unfixed world of continuous encounter and becoming.
Toor studied painting and drawing at Ohio Wesleyan University and received his MFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He has held solo exhibitions at the Tampa Museum of Art, Florida (2023); Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham (2023); Honolulu Museum of Art (2023); M WOODS, Beijing (2023); Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland (2022) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2020).
