Salman Toor

“All my paintings are imagery, so when I’m painting there aren’t any sources in front of me... I am thinking of particular memories, people or moods as I’m painting; my subjects are made-up of people who I think are like me”.

- Salman Toor

(Salman Toor quoted in A. Angelos, 'I wanted to be as good as the white old masters: meet painter Salman Toor', It’s Nice That, 7 November 2019)

Salman Toor’s Untitled is an intimate vignette of quotidian life, sensitively exposing an introspective moment. At the poetic threshold between fiction and autobiography, the unique visual lexicon of Toor’s native Pakistan and his education in Western academic painting merges to explore cultural identity and convey narrative through colour, composition and form. Recently the subject of a widely acclaimed solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and with works housed in the collections of the Tate in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and M Woods in Beijing, Toor is one of the most sought-after figurative painters of his generation.

Born in 1983, Toor studied painting and drawing at Ohio Wesleyan University and received his MFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Toor has stated of his pursuit of academic painting: “I wanted to be as good as the white old masters” (Angelos, 'I wanted to be as good as the white old masters: meet painter Salman Toor', 2019). He has tirelessly studied the works of artists such as Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, to enact 'complex and respectful (not ironic) conversation with past painting'. (R. Smith, 'Salman Toor, a Painter at Home in Two Worlds', The New York Times, 23 December 2020)

Unlike many of Toor's canvases which are often occupied with multiple figures interacting with each other, the subject of the current lot is a solitary woman. She is shown nude, reclining on a bed, a cigarette loosely held between her fingers and on the packet beside her. The fleshy tones used by Toor are echoed in the interior's surroundings. The painting is intimate, without being voyeuristic, and in its framing and execution is reminiscent of a photo in soft focus.