Salman Toor

Salman Toor was born in 1983 in Lahore, Pakistan, and attended Aitchison College there, where he developed an early interest in drawing. He moved to the United States to study art, earning a BFA in painting from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2006. He then moved to Brooklyn to complete an MFA in painting at the Pratt Institute in 2009, and has lived and worked in New York City since.

His paintings, worked in oil on panel or canvas, borrow the light and compositional habits of European Old Master painting and apply them to quiet, often nocturnal scenes of contemporary queer South Asian diasporic life: house parties, bedrooms, immigration lines, and rooftop gatherings, frequently rendered in a signature emerald green. Early solo exhibitions in New York and South Asia through the 2010s built a following before his profile rose sharply with "Salman Toor: How Will I Know" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2020 and 2021, his first museum solo exhibition. The show traveled in expanded form as "No Ordinary Love" to the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Honolulu Museum of Art in 2022 and 2023, and in late 2022 he presented new paintings and drawings at M WOODS in Beijing, an early solo museum exhibition in Asia. He is currently represented by Luhring Augustine in New York and Thomas Dane Gallery in London, and a major solo exhibition, "Someone Like You," is scheduled to open at the Courtauld Gallery in London in October 2026.

Toor's 2020 to 2021 solo debut at the Whitney Museum, "How Will I Know," drew wide critical attention, with recurring commentary centered on his fusion of Old Master light and staging with intimate, contemporary scenes of queer South Asian diasporic life. The exhibition traveled in expanded form as "No Ordinary Love" to the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Honolulu Museum of Art in 2022 and 2023, extending that critical conversation to new audiences.

Toor's auction market is young and has moved quickly. Christie's sold "Rooftop Party with Ghosts 1" (2015) for USD 822,000 in 2021, a record that was broken within months when "The Arrival" (2019) sold at Sotheby's for USD 867,000, more than ten times its high estimate. His current auction high is "Four Friends" (2019), an oil on panel that sold at Sotheby's New York on 16 November 2022. Reported figures for that sale vary by source, from a roughly USD 1.2 million price cited by Forbes at the time to the roughly USD 1.5 million to 1.6 million premium-inclusive totals cited by his gallery and other outlets, a spread that reflects hammer price versus buyer's-premium reporting rather than a disputed fact. The same 2022 season also produced strong results for "Girl and Boy with Driver" (2013), USD 882,000 at Christie's, and "4 Guests" (2019), USD 856,800 at Christie's, underscoring broad, not single-lot, demand for his early output.

Toor's market is still early in its life cycle. Prices have risen sharply over a short span, but the number of auction appearances remains small, and reported totals for even the headline "Four Friends" sale vary depending on whether fees are included, so any single price should be read with that caveat. There is no catalogue raisonne, which means provenance and verification run through his two representing galleries. His museum footprint, led by the Whitney debut and a growing list of institutional exhibitions, is the strongest evidence of durability; the thin, fast-moving auction record is the main reason to treat any individual result cautiously.