Luhring Augustine Gallery — Attraction in New York

In his latest solo exhibition, No Ordinary Love, Salman Toor once again draws us into his evocative universe of queer intimacy, alienation, and lush painterly fiction. Held at Luhring Augustine in New York, the show brims with Toor’s signature green-washed palette and emotionally charged, dreamlike compositions. Whether capturing figures in dim urban streets, intimate bathrooms, hospital wards, or otherworldly gardens, Toor renders private moments with uncanny tenderness and vulnerability.

The exhibition oscillates between the real and surreal, anchored by queer brown bodies—often young men—grappling with visibility, desire, and care. One painting shows a figure mid-selfie in a dim bathroom, his body vulnerable, half-lit, a phone obscuring his face—a quiet mirror of digital-era performativity and solitude. In another work, a hospital ward becomes a site of quiet connection, care, and erotic undertone, with patients and caretakers occupying green-lit beds under the gaze of time’s slow march.

The painter’s hand is loose but deliberate, building atmosphere through thick brushstrokes and soft distortion. Many of the scenes, like the nocturnal group huddled beneath a street sign or a mythic tableau where animals and humans coexist, feel staged yet spontaneous—as if Toor’s characters have stepped out of a private theater and into our shared unconscious.

The show's title, No Ordinary Love, cues us into the overarching theme: the longing for tenderness, recognition, and sanctuary in a world that often withholds it. Love, here, is not loud or grandiose—it’s coded in a glance, a touch, a shadowy backdrop. Yet the work resists melancholia. Instead, it conjures a space of lush resistance—where softness, queerness, and brownness assert their right to exist, desire, and dream.

Toor’s practice continues to expand the possibilities of figurative painting. With references ranging from Baroque tableaux to contemporary urban life, he invites viewers to contemplate what queer utopia might look like in fleeting gestures and imagined worlds. This show reminds us that love—especially queer love—is often made in the margins, and therein...

This show, of Earth and Heaven had some amazing pieces of privately owned 12 to 16 century artifacts and art that you would only expect to see in a museum.

It was very cool because you can get really close to the art since most of it was not behind glass and see the...

There was one piece of art I liked there but I broke it because I didn’t like it the staff agreed with me and helped me break it. Im pretty sure...