"Salman Toor: 'Painting Is So Serious But Also, Why Does It Have To Be So Serious?'" by Alice Newell-Hanson

On a warm day in June, I find Salman Toor in his studio, a modestly sized corner unit in a former knitting factory in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Giant windows let in the afternoon light and the remaining wall space is covered in drawings and paintings: clusters of related works pinned here and there, representing ideas that are still swirling into definition. Toor wears a black sleeveless top, black parachute pants and thickly cushioned sneakers of the kind beloved by both nightclubbers and middle-aged parents on city tours (his straight-across haircut and silver chain bracelets clearly place him in the former group). A sofa and a pair of armchairs stand to one side of the space and a nearby cardboard box is filled with mismatched wine and Champagne bottles left over from various gatherings. On a desk towards the centre of the room, because, he joked, he is a “total control freak”, Toor has placed printouts of the works in his forthcoming London show so that we can discuss them together over bottles of cherry Schweppes.

Growing up in Lahore, Pakistan, in a conservative middle-class Muslim household – his mother is a housewife; his father owns a car dealership; they sent their son to the prestigious all-boys school Aitchison College – Toor demonstrated his gift for drawing early on. “It’s something that comes naturally,” he says, speaking with a gentle, lilting voice that makes him seem somehow of another era, until, as often happens, he breaks into a joyful ricocheting laugh. But a show at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 2020 established him as one of the most talented painters of his generation.

Read full article at vogue.co.uk.