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.

His figurative oil paintings – luminous, dreamlike scenes often rendered in shades of emerald – explore themes of belonging, community, sex and love but also alienation and uncertainty. (2019), for example, which appeared in the exhibition and sold at auction two years later for $1.5 million, shows a quartet of young brown and white queer men dancing and drinking cocktails inside a city apartment whose one small window frames a dark lifeless tree outside. The scene is unmistakably contemporary; there are string lights and a glowing iPhone. But the men’s beatific faces and the curling licks of colour that make up their waving limbs and wispy hair hint at the influence of the old master and impressionist painters with whom Toor has long been enthralled.

Toor has fed his fascination with European painting during frequent trips to London, often stopping there when he travels from his home in New York to visit friends and family in Lahore (in 2002 he left Pakistan and moved to the US to study art at Ohio Wesleyan University, later completing a master’s at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute). He’s so familiar with London’s art museums that, he says, “I know when works have been rearranged at the National Gallery.” But perhaps his favourite collection is at the Courtauld Gallery, where about 20 of his own paintings will be on display in October in his first European solo exhibition. Made over the past seven years, they’ll fill a series of rooms just beyond the gallery’s impressionist works, as if ushering their relevance into the present day. The paintings will range from one of  Toor’s largest, (2023), a 3.2m-wide canvas of twirling and voguing spectral dancers that belongs to the Pinault Collection in Paris, to the more intimate 51cm-wide (2021), of a boy considering his reflection in his mother’s bedroom mirror, which the artist is loaning from his own bedroom.

A selection of drawings will also be on view, including (2021). Acquired by the Courtauld for its permanent collection in 2024, the black-and-white ink and gouache work belongs to Toor’s ongoing series of “fag puddles”: fantastical, unsettling still life arrangements of tangled body parts, clothing and other assorted debris, from charging cables and school ties to feather boas. For Toor, these “defeated, fabulous heaps of objects”, he says, are about “a failure to translate parts of yourself”. It’s at once darkly funny and a sign of Toor’s triumph that this one, in which a contorted body is contained within a glass case like a foreign oddity in a conquering country’s museum, will itself be on display in a British gallery.

This exhibition will be his first that isn’t made up of new works and he and its curator, Elena Crippa, chose pieces, he says, that would “electrify or contradict each other, or enhance a narrative”, especially in relation to the building. For years, Toor has been drawn to the gallery’s works by the 17th-century Flemish masters Anthony van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens, because of the dignity of their often aristocratic subjects, he explained, “and the ways it can be so beautiful and toxic”. But he also gravitates to Pieter Bruegel’s early 16th-century images of peasants. “That made me very interested in the depiction in European painting of foreign people or people who work in the sun with dark or golden skin,” he says, and the idea that these were paintings for rich people to buy and laugh at. These preoccupations correspond to themes in his own works, he says, of “the movement between Muslim man, queer boy and the language of  Western art, of being a poor foreign person or the comedy of being a well-off foreign person”.

He knew he wanted to include his work (2022), a Bruegel-esque roundel depicting two men frolicking through the countryside in a ragged mix of contemporary and Renaissance-era clothes. The men’s skin colour is deliberately ambiguous and one wears a single puffy trainer; the other a heeled court shoe on one foot, a lace-up on the other and no trousers. Toor recalled a discussion with a curator, when the work was featured in a solo exhibition at the M Woods museum in Beijing in 2023, about how many penises was the right number to display. In the end, there were a few works showing naked bodies, most of which were displayed in a room together, which, Toor notes, could easily be roped off. The roundel, he says, is “a joke about these culturally mixed-up beggars”, and the punch line is always shifting.

Among the Courtauld’s many impressionist masterpieces is Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882). In 2017, Toor recalls, he stood in front of it and thought, “I want to have done this.” Two years later, back in his studio in New York, he made his own version, The Bar on East 13th Street (2019), working as always from imagination and memory. While Manet’s painting depicts a lily-white woman in a velvet choker staring out from behind the bar at the famous Paris music hall, Toor’s shows a brown man with two long braids making a cocktail with a slightly unreadable expression, both welcoming and wary, at a gay bar with a disco ball. The bar is Manet’s but also a composite of the Phoenix, a queer bar near Toor’s apartment, and various New York motorcycle bars. Revisiting the work now, before it appears in the show, he says, he understands that “I wanted to come out through painting. The stories I’d been painting were very obtuse. I wanted to get into it more directly. That also became a celebration of self-love and glamour.” The words “self-love” come with the vocal equivalent of air quotes and a smile, as if to say the concept no longer seems as novel and radical as it once did. “It was a stage in my life that I’m past now,” he says, “but it was very, very enjoyable.”

Looking back has also made him nostalgic for a period when he wasn’t as burdened by expectation. Toor works quickly, using a brush like a pencil to draw outlines that he then fills with daubs of paint, layering wet on wet. “If I hesitate, I feel like anyone looking at the painting can see it,” he says. “It was much easier when the materials I was using were less expensive.” And when his work was less in demand. Today, he says, “I’m not able to walk in and think, ‘Nothing to lose.’” He gestures to a large, looming Belgian-linen canvas propped against the wall behind us, still in its packaging. Earlier, he’d expressed his relief at having recently reduced the size of his studio, giving up the unit he’d started renting next door and re-erecting the dividing wall: the pressure had become overwhelming. With increasing recognition has also come a fear of repeating himself. “A lot of what my hand could do, I’ve seen in the last six years,” he says as we began to walk around the studio, inspecting the sketches and paintings taped to the walls. “I’m interested to learn more, to explore more.” On a tall wooden easel sits a pair of ink drawings of a man with a perfect aquiline nose. Toor has started working with models for the first time since university and had asked a friend to sit for him. He’s enjoying studying other people’s body language again, in part to escape from his own mind.

“I love that it’s more social too,” he says. The past few years have made him think intently about friends and family, what it means both to have them and to lose them. His works in progress almost all grapple, in some way, with the carnage of the current moment. In one, a man holds the drooping body of his child above his head, another is a portrait of the student activist Mahmoud Khalil mid-speech. When we met, Toor and his friend, the Israeli-American artist Doron Langberg, whose studio is nearby, were preparing to open a show called In a Free State at Luhring Augustine gallery in New York, for which they asked other close friends to contribute works that touch on political conflict and its personal repercussions. “I think there’s a new cynicism that these kinds of spaces aren’t realistic,” says Toor, “and we just wanted to say, ‘That’s bullshit.’”

He’s always understood that it’s friends who are best able to help him wade out of his thoughts. Often, when he’s finishing up at the studio – “it’s rare that something amazing happens after three” – his partner, the musician Ali Sethi, will call him, telling him to come join him and a group for drinks. “I’m always like, ‘Painting is so serious but also, why does it have to be so serious?’” Toor says, laughing and mimicking a tormented artist pulling out their hair. The show at Luhring Augustine was set to open at the beginning of Pride month and he was looking forward to going dancing. “Painting’s a bit like dancing,” he says, following another train of thought out into the late afternoon. “You have to do it by yourself and enjoy it and not be self-conscious. And dancing for me is pretty easy. So that’s good.”

Salman Toor: Someone Like You is at the Courtauld Gallery, WC2, from 2 October to 10 January 2027. All art shown in article are untitled works and works in progress.