Salman Toor (b. Lahore, Pakistan, 1983)
Museum Boys, 2021
Oil on panel
30 x 40 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York
Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.
Salman Toor’s Museum Boys draws on the quiet domestic exchanges in Vermeer’s paintings. Set in an allegorical space filled with imaginary sculpture, a ghost-like figure in the foreground smiles coyly at a partially dressed man in the middle ground, echoing the mood of tipsy flirtation in Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl. The sense of arrival and anticipation mirrors the exchange between the figures in Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid. Whereas the objects in Vermeer’s paintings illustrate the growing influence of the Dutch Republic on international trade, the surreal menagerie in Toor’s painting conjures queer mythology and colonial plunder. The heap of objects and limbs in the vitrine between the figures—a recurring motif in the artist’s work—signifies greed, lust, and exhaustion, a hectic consumerist orgy re-organized and re-compiled for a museum space. The vitrine hints at a darker aspect of Vermeer’s prosperous subjects, beneficiaries of the global trade of spices, porcelain, and much more.
The dandyish fashion on view in Museum Boys—a buckled hat, a pale shawl, a pearl earring—is a reference to the costume in Vermeer’s pictures. All this while an assortment of European and Buddhist-looking busts solemnly stand sentinel to an Islamic tombstone in the background. Bringing together a love of narrative, questions of cultural ownership, and queer taxonomy, Toor’s Museum Boys is a sultry, sidelong glance at the canonical world of the Old Masters.
Museum Boys temporarily takes the place of Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at Her Music, which is currently on loan to the exhibition Johannes Vermeer: On Reflection at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany (September 10, 2021–January 2, 2022).
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About the Artist
Salman Toor (b. Lahore, Pakistan, 1983) was the subject of a critically acclaimed solo exhibition, How Will I Know, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2020–21. Other recent solo shows include The Pleasure Pavilion: A series of installations | Salman Toor (Luhring Augustine, Brooklyn, New York) and I Know a Place (Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi, India). Toor’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions and projects, including Any distance between us (RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island); and I will wear you in my heart of heart (FLAG Art Foundation, New York); Art on the Grid: 50 Artists’ Reflections on the Pandemic (Public Art Fund, New York); Relations: Diaspora and Painting (PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal); Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago); You Here? (Lahore Biennale 2018, Pakistan); and the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India. His work is in the permanent collections of the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, New York; M Woods Museum, Beijing, China; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Tate, London; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; the Wake Forest University Art Collection, Winston-Salem, North Carolina; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Toor is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. An image of his painting Music Room (2021) is featured on the Hayward Gallery Billboard, London, through spring 2022. Toor earned his M.F.A. at Pratt Institute in 2009.
Photo: Salman Toor