‘Someone Like You’ opens today in London: Salman Toor’s first European solo exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery

The exhibition ‘Salman Toor: Someone Like You’ opens today, 2 October 2026, at the Courtauld Gallery in London — the first solo exhibition in Europe by the renowned New York-based painter Salman Toor (born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1983). As the Courtauld Gallery announces, the exhibition brings together 19 of the artist’s most iconic, provocative and humorous paintings, created since 2019 — many of them never seen before in Britain.

The paintings depict people in shared moments of friendship and love, but also of solitude and alienation. The centrepiece is ‘The Bar on East 13th’ (2019), inspired directly by Toor’s visit to the Courtauld in 2017, where he saw Édouard Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère’ (1882) — the Courtauld’s own painting, which hangs in the same building as his exhibition.

The artist himself says his works ‘depict queer and immigrant lives that squeeze between different cultures and stand in the tension between intimacy and exposure, belonging and alienation’.

The exhibition is accompanied by a display of his drawings in the Gilbert & Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery, among them ‘Fag Puddle in Vitrine’ (2021), acquired by the Courtauld in 2024.

Toor broke onto the international scene in 2020–2021 with his first solo museum exhibition, ‘How Will I Know’, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and took part in the Venice Biennale in 2024. In September 2026, according to TIME magazine, he was included in the inaugural TIME100 Art list; his paintings have sold for more than $1 million at auction.

The exhibition, which occupies the Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries on the third floor of the Courtauld Gallery, is open daily from 10:00 to 18:00, and on Fridays until 20:00 — including 2 October, 6 November and 4 December 2026, and 8 January 2027. It runs until 10 January 2027.