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Salman Toor is a Pakistani-American contemporary painter whose figurative works explore the everyday lives of queer South Asian men. Set in both private and public spaces, his paintings blend social narrative with art-historical resonance, addressing themes of diasporic identity, belonging, vulnerability, and community. His figures challenge familiar visual tropes, reflecting on how difference is experienced internally and perceived externally,... Salman Toor is a Pakistani-American contemporary painter whose figurative works explore the everyday lives of queer South Asian men. Set in both private and public spaces, his paintings blend social narrative with art-historical resonance, addressing themes of diasporic identity, belonging, vulnerability, and community. His figures challenge familiar visual tropes, reflecting on how difference is experienced internally and perceived externally, particularly within queer diasporic contexts.

Trained initially in academic painting and deeply informed by European art history, Toor draws on Rococo, Baroque, and Neoclassical traditions while incorporating contemporary urban imagery from South Asia and the global diaspora. His compositions often juxtapose painterly references to the Old Masters with everyday markers of contemporary life, creating layered narratives that situate his subjects within broader cultural and political realities. Through these scenes, Toor examines the complexities of visibility, surveillance, intimacy, and social precarity as they shape the lived experiences of queer South Asian men. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1983, Toor developed an early passion for drawing while studying at Aitchison College. He later moved to the United States to attend Ohio Wesleyan University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 2006. He completed his Master of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute in New York in 2009. This transnational trajectory continues to inform his work, which moves fluidly between personal memory and collective experience.

Toor has presented major solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2020–21); M WOODS, Beijing (2022–23); and the Baltimore Museum of Art (2022), among others. He is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. His work is held in prominent public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.

He lives and works in New York.

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