The Studio, 2026

Salman Toor

Salman Toor: Hi, I’m Salman Toor. I grew up in the city of Lahore, in Pakistan, and for the last 15 years I’ve lived and worked in New York City. The studio, like most of my work, is painted from my imagination. The painting is a kind of allegory of a haunted studio, where an artist may be witnessing and painting apparitions, spirits, or models.

The painter himself is a hobo-like figure that recurs in my work – a post-apocalyptic figure of humour and pathos, with a rubbery, hairy body and a Pinocchio- or marionette-type nose. For me, a figure like this plays with anxieties about otherness, foreignness, hygiene, race, and immigration, but also a love of European art history. Because my paintings are imaginary, they often have some element of autobiography, and I enjoy painting figures that give cultural cues that veer between queer boy and Muslim man.

There is a ritualistic quality to the figure group on the right: some sort of ancestral spirits and composites of Middle Eastern patriarchs, and Indian mothers and families, and ghosts depositing or collecting from a heap of debris. This kind of debris is a recurring figure in my paintings, and I refer to it affectionately as a “fag puddle”.

Fag puddles are sad, funny heaps of fabulous exhaustion, of failure and collapse. But they can be heroic too – something like a heap of laundry, or hoards of imperial treasure, or a funeral pyre. And then I get to paint objects that I like, like tangles of wire, candles, shards of wood, and entangled limbs.

Fag puddles have a sense of abandonment about them: things to be sifted through and processed, heaps of rubble and bodies, challenging notions of whose being is most or least moving to us. This painting is maybe a dialogue between desire, the love of the body, and rituals of culture that can’t seem to coexist peacefully except in painting, for me.