‘Brown Men Are Fearless, Funny and Sexy’: Salman Toor on Clubbing, Queerness and New York’s Muslim Moment

In Salman Toor’s paintings, queer south Asian men hang out in bars, twerk at trippy gatherings and lose themselves in phone screens. Sometimes they huddle in the back of taxis or pillow-fight on beds. In one portrait, a brown man stares apprehensively while facing customs officials. For the 43-year-old Pakistani American artist, it’s crucial that these figures take centre stage, after years of being demonised and erased.

“It excites me that the cuteness and sexiness of brown protagonists can become familiar,” says Toor when we meet at his sun-drenched Brooklyn studio, a few weeks before his first solo show in Europe. “Their stories are not a gay side story in a family saga. It’s the main story. And everyone else is in the background.”

Over the last decade, Toor has been helping to redraw the narratives around immigrants, desire, power and sex. His artwork – rich, figurative oil paintings that echo and subvert European old masters and Indian Mughal miniatures – has confirmed his status as an “international art star” (the New Yorker) and “one of the most fascinating painters of his generation” (the New York Times). Solo museum exhibitions in New York, Baltimore and Beijing have earned universal praise, while in November 2022, his painting Four Friends sold for $1.2m at Sotheby’s. Time recently included him in its most influential art people list.

Next month, London’s Courtauld Gallery presents Someone Like You, a greatest hits of Toor’s paintings and drawings that he selected with the curator Elena Crippa. As it’s home to many of his favourite baroque and impressionist artists, he couldn’t be more thrilled. The Courtauld was one of the galleries he visited on his first trip to London from Pakistan. “It’s the most exciting thing that could happen,” he says, looking genuinely humbled.

Dressed in black parachute trousers, a grey sleeveless T-shirt and chunky fashion trainers, Toor is friendly and eager to talk about his art, armed with a printout of images from the show. Like the themes in his work, our conversation moves from pop culture (no, this show is “absolutely not named after an Adele song”) to global politics (he regularly questions his “westernisation”) to family relationships (good, but they’d like to see fewer “willies” in his paintings).

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I came out through painting – it was exciting because I felt free

As an art student, Toor searched for inspiration at the Courtauld during his many “obsessive” periods. “I was looking at a lot of Rubens and Van Dyck,” he explains. He became particularly obsessed with Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. “I stood in front of it and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this has all the solutions to my problems’,” he laughs. In his 2019 painting The Bar on East 13th, Toor pays tribute to Manet’s masterpiece, relocating it to New York’s East Village, where hipster queer couples make out and a brown barman wearing nail polish and braided hair takes the place of the melancholy French barmaid and partying bourgeoisie.

Looking at that image now, Toor has mixed feelings: “I had just come out through painting so it was exciting because I felt free. It was a time of well-deserved self-love. But I also felt in danger: I was getting a lot of negative, threatening messages online. I’m from a country which is very conservative. Those are very specific feelings from that time.”

Toor was born in Lahore, Pakistan, into a middle-class Muslim family. To avoid his sporty schoolmates, the young artist sought refuge in the art department of the city’s elite Aitchison College and honed his talent. He moved to the US in 2002 to study art in Columbus, Ohio, where he felt isolated until he moved into a hippy commune with “the dreadlocked, blue-haired art kids”. In 2009, he graduated with a master’s in fine arts from New York’s Pratt Institute.

Within a few years, Toor landed on his signature style: emerald green compositions with explicit gay themes based on his and his friends’ experiences navigating culture and belonging in New York City. In previous interviews, he’s explained that he chose green because it is simultaneously glamorous and poisonous. Today, Toor adds that it has an “atmospheric aspect that you can go deeper inside, an outdoor or nocturnal forest-like place beckoning you”. Most of the artworks in Someone Like You were produced in the last seven years, during which Toor gained US citizenship. “They’re images about immigration and people on the verge of … the threshold of the free world or whatever.” He pauses, reflecting on the reality of US politics. “Or maybe not.”

Toor is excited to be in London for the exhibition. He has fond memories of visiting friends in the city in the early 00s, going to Soho bars and the trashy pop club G-A-Y before taking a night bus home to Streatham – “shades on, getting a doner kebab,” he says. “We were just kids. London was a city that opened me up to gay nightlife and art history.”

The city also provides a setting in one image. Cross Street grew out of a scene he glimpsed from the window of a favourite London restaurant: Tayyabs in Whitechapel. It shows a group of buff skaters hanging by a street sign as a mullah passes by. Toor was struck by “the proximity of two kinds of people” and wanted to capture the different threads of masculinity that were intimidating to him growing up: the school bullies on one hand and the religious figure on the other.

Right now, Toor lives in New York with his partner, the musician Ali Sethi, in a thrilling moment for the city’s south Asian and Middle Eastern communities. Across politics, culture and arts, New York is witnessing a historic surge of energy and creativity that’s been given a confidence boost by the election of mayor Zohran Mamdani. Earlier this year, the Guardian profiled many of Muslim New York’s artists, organisers and thinkers while New York magazine devoted a special issue to mark the shifting sands of “Habibi City”.

“It’s Mamdani’s New York,” Toor beams. “What I love about this city is that there’s a wonderful connection of artists and creative people who are part of our circle.” As a first-generation immigrant he’s excited to see new worlds unfolding around him, the classic New York story, concrete jungle where dreams are made: “People are brilliant at finding new solutions to being from traditional backgrounds, and choosing and shedding things to be part of the future.”

Not long after Mamdani won the Democratic nomination for mayor, a portrait by Toor of the future leader surfaced on Instagram. Toor was asked by his friend, the film director Mira Nair, Zohran’s mother, to paint the family in 2007. “The group portrait didn’t come out that well. Mira has it locked up and I hope it remains in storage,” he laughs. “But I knew this [individual portrait of Zohran] was good. She was thrilled and it’s in their home. I saw it there recently.” How does he feel about the image now? “It’s more delicate and smaller than I remember. It’s more finely painted than I thought – at the time it was my idea of rough. Maybe I’ve become freer or grungy.”

He won’t be drawn on Mamdani’s first nine months in office but he recently curated the low key exhibition In a Free State, with his friend, the Israeli American artist Doron Langberg. It was an attempt to deal with the global political horrors that left him creatively crippled and unable to paint figures for a five-month period. Showcasing their friends and others, including many Middle Eastern artists, it aimed to “visualise and contend with a chaotic and alienating time”. Toor says also he wanted to address the cynicism people have about art and politics.

After Someone Like You opens, Toor will return to his artwork. The studio walls are covered with sketches and ideas; unfinished pieces include an experiment in painting an erect penis, a large image of workmen fixing a phallic air vent and some attempts at drawing dogs. There is also a portrait of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student who was detained for more than three months and became the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestine speech. Toor was inspired to capture him after seeing Khalil give a powerful speech, he says, returning to the theme of the “brown protagonist”.

Earlier in the interview we discussed the rise of a new generation of US politicians, including the Michigan senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed. “The great thing about the new brown men that are so visible now is that they’re fearless,” he says. “They’re funny and they’re sexy. I would love to see the west deal with that.”

Judging by the hysterical reaction to El-Sayed’s recent win and the bad faith attacks on Zohran Mamdani, they don’t seem to be dealing with it very well, I suggest.

“We’ll see,” he says firmly. “They should get used to it.”

• Salman Toor: Someone Like You is at the Courtauld, London, 2 October to 10 January