We're pretty excited about this show and the forthcoming exhibition catalog, to be published by @baltimoremuseumofart & @gregoryrmiller — to say the least!⁠ ⁠ In his @newyorker review, Calvin Tomkins writes: "Toor is one of those gifted souls who find drawing as natural and essential as talking. From the age of five, he drew constantly. His favorite subjects, borrowed from his mother’s fashion magazines, were pretty young women with flowing hair. 'My aunt encouraged me to draw sports cars instead, so I drew a boxy, badly imagined vehicle with a girl’s head sticking out the window,' he recalls. 'I was very, very femme growing up, and I often felt intimidated and ostracized.' He was the firstborn of three children in a well-to-do family in Lahore. His father, who owns a Honda dealership there, is tall, handsome, conservative, and emphatically masculine. His mother is a housewife, 'very doting and cuddling,' Toor said. When Toor was fifteen, he tried to tell his parents that he was gay. 'They didn’t accept that,' he told me. 'They said, "You’re not developed yet, you just don’t know.”' Although both of them eventually came to terms with his sexuality, they did so, Toor said, more with tolerance than with understanding. Homosexual activity is a punishable offense in Pakistan. Although the law is not strictly observed, gay behavior in public can be dangerous, as Toor makes clear in his painting 'Car Boys,' in which a uniformed policeman shines his flashlight into a stopped car with two young men in it. What gave him the courage to come out to his parents when he was fifteen? 'I just felt like, yeah, I can do it,' he recalls. 'I can do anything....'"⁠ ⁠ Read the full review via linkinbio.⁠ ⁠ salman.toor #salmantoor #noordinarylove #salmantoornoordinarylove