Salman Toor will open his first solo exhibition in Europe at London’s Courtauld Gallery on 2 October 2026, bringing 19 paintings to Britain for the first time. The exhibition, titled ‘Someone Like You’, runs through 10 January 2027 and has been curated in collaboration with Elena Crippa.
Toor, who was born in Lahore and is now based in New York, has built an international profile with figurative oil paintings of queer South Asian men in urban settings. His subjects move between domestic interiors and public spaces, in scenes that examine connection, isolation, identity and belonging.
The Courtauld show brings together paintings made since 2019. It also addresses social disparity and exclusion through questions of class, placing private moments alongside the pressures of public life. The exhibition arrives as Toor’s work has become increasingly prominent in museums, biennales and the market.
Toor moved from Pakistan to the United States in 2002, aged 20. He studied painting and drawing at Ohio Wesleyan University, largely on an international student scholarship, before completing postgraduate study at the Pratt Institute in New York in 2009.
His paintings draw on European old masters and Mughal miniatures of India. In ‘The Bar on East 13th’, painted in 2019, Toor paid tribute to Édouard Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère’, linking his contemporary subjects with an established European art-historical tradition.
His first museum solo exhibition, ‘How Will I Know’, opened at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 2020 and helped establish his international standing. A later touring exhibition, ‘No Ordinary Love’, was organised originally by the Baltimore Museum of Art and travelled to museums in Tampa, Honolulu and Massachusetts between 2022 and 2024.
Toor’s work was also exhibited at the 2024 Venice Biennale. At auction, his painting ‘Four Friends’ sold for $1.2 million at Sotheby’s in November 2022.
In 2026, TIME magazine included Toor in the Icons section of its inaugural TIME100 Art list of 100 influential people in the art world. He had previously appeared on TIME’s TIME100 Next list in 2021. The New York Times and The New Yorker have also given his work critical praise.
The Courtauld exhibition will anchor the gallery’s Frank Davis Memorial Lecture series dedicated to South Asian diaspora art. For Toor, whose paintings repeatedly return to the intimacy and uncertainty of shared spaces, the London show marks a European institutional debut after a rapid rise in the United States.
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