Salman Toor (b 1983), The Bar on East 13th, 2019, oil on panel, 91.4 x 121.9cm [© Salman Toor; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Thomas Dane Gallery]

REGULAR visitors to the Courtauld will no doubt see something familiar in Salman Toor’s painting The Bar on East 13th, which forms part of his first major show at a European institution.

It’s a clear nod to one of the Courtauld’s best-known works, Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, from 1882.

Several of Toor’s paintings explore his own interest in museum settings but that’s not the thing that first strikes the viewer at this show of some 20 works. It’s the use of colour, especially the striking greens, as with his East 13th bar.

Trained in America and now living in New York, Toor was born in 1983 in Lahore, Pakistan, and the painting is an early example of a number of night-time scenes.

Ghost Ball, one of his largest oils to date, at more than 1.9 by 3.3metres, has pale dancing figures in their own ghostly green setting. Inspired in part, by an early 18th-century watercolour from India, the artist describes it as “an allegory for living between cultures or languages, the surrealism and comedy of that condition”.

There’s less green in Museum Boys, a work from 2021 featuring two unkempt figures standing in a gallery with sculptures and a vitrine encasing a curled figure and a Marcel Duchamp-style urinal reminiscent of his famous Fountain from 1917.

Messages are to the forefront here, though they’re not necessarily that clear.

Pillow Fight from 2022 is, however, and Toor explores two “favoured” subjects in interacting bodies and the bed as a setting of intimacy.

And, as the Courtauld notes, his works are “visual stories” resonating with broader cultural events.

The artist himself says his works “depict queer and immigrant lives that straddle different cultures and inhabit the tension between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement. What it means to find a community, but also the daily costs associated with visibility.” He is driven “to show narratives about people who look like me”.

A display of Toor’s drawings can also be seen in the nearby Gilbert & Ildiko Butler gallery and these include Fag Puddle in Vitrine, 2021, acquired by the Courtauld in 2024.

• Salman Toor: Someone Like You is at The Courtauld Gallery, Strand, WC2R 0RN till January 10.
https://courtauld.ac.uk/