Luhring Augustine is proud to announce Want Maker, an exhibition of latest work by Juxtapoz past featured artist and generational expertise, Salman Toor. This marks the artist’s first main presentation in New York since his watershed exhibition on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork in 2020, in addition to Toor’s first solo present with the gallery. On view from Might 2 by June 21, 2025, the exhibition can be put in throughout each of the gallery’s places, with work featured at Luhring Augustine Chelsea and the artist’s first devoted presentation of works on paper at Luhring Augustine Tribeca.
By his luxurious and evocative figurative works, Toor examines “vulnerability inside up to date private and non-private life and the notion of group within the context of queer, diasporic id.” Mining the alternatives, anxieties, and comedies inherent within the seek for selfhood, in addition to within the immigrant’s journey dwelling between cultures, Toor employs and destabilizes particular tropes as a way to mirror on the best way distinction is perceived by the self and by others. In a lot of Toor’s compositions, his figures dwell in allegorical areas of ready, anticipation, and apprehension, whereas in others these often-marginalized our bodies flourish safely and inhabit the consolation and intimacy of their non-public lives with dignity. Within the new work, drawings, and etchings created for this exhibition, Toor locations his imaginary and but deeply relatable figures in a variety of circumstances and settings, inspecting the nuances and complexities of our paradoxical and polarized time.
Toor’s work oscillates between heartening and harrowing, seductive and poignant, inviting and eerie; such dichotomies are echoed in the best way he employs his frequent viridescent palette. As critic and author Evan Moffitt explains, “the Emperor Nero watched gladiator flights by a reduce emerald to protect his eyes from the blazing Roman solar. When inexperienced applies its filter to the world, it may be a lens onto nice magnificence or horrific violence; in Toor’s work, it at all times illuminates particular sensations of each. Toor’s palette lends itself as readily to goals because it does to nightmares, to poisons in addition to to salves. Liberation and entrapment are by no means that far aside. All of it relies on the way you maintain it as much as the sunshine.” All through his work Toor additionally fuses and complicates artwork historic references with up to date issues, as he does with recurring motifs, corresponding to his “fag puddles”—leaky and sometimes perversely opulent heaps of limbs, clothes, and objects—and the best way wherein he attires his figures in fashions from throughout time and cultures. As curator Rachel Cieśla notes, the artist’s work “is a compilation of ‘issues’ that mixes historic traditions with items of native historical past, fashionable tradition, politics and his lived expertise… [Toor] pulls from artwork historical past’s ‘pile of limbs’ to carry into being new our bodies composed from part-bodies. In any case, model is embodied information and by particularly recounting the custom of European portray in his compositions, Toor carries that historical past into this century and muddies the divisions of time, place and circumstance. He exhibits us that what portray can do as a progressive observe is to make historical past spatial because it turns into outer and interior, leaking in all instructions.”
