Salman Toor, Aashiana (Hearth and Home), 2012. Estimate £30,000 - 50,000. 20th Century and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London.
In Aashiana (Hearth and Home), Salman Toor portrays a mother embracing her two young daughters while glancing at an open book. At the lower center of the composition, a miniature man looks onto the scene, shadowed to the right by a group of seated witnesses. Behind the woman and children, a lush background takes shape combining real elements and quasi-fantastical components, cartoonishly delineated. The three layers with which Toor composes the image seem progressional: the first, depicting the impoverished minuscule figures, point and lead to the second, featuring an ostensibly Westernized mother with her daughters, finally culminating in a busy, colorful backdrop, emblematic of modern Western culture. Aashiana (Hearth and Home) captures what Maxine Wally has called the artist’s ability to portray people “who stand at the crux of two societies: one being developing countries; and the other, the ‘developed’ West.”
I think of the pictures as short stories where the emphasis falls on unexpected places, seemingly mundane situations become illuminating or interesting ones. –Salman Toor
Beaming with commercial and critical momentum, Salman Toor has been garnering increased attention since the announcement of his upcoming major solo exhibition slated to take place at the Whitney Museum of Art. During his studies at Ohio Wesleyan University, followed by his MFA at Pratt Institute, from 2006 to 2009, Toor spent countless hours poring over the works of Rococo, Baroque, and Neoclassical-era masters. Much of Toor’s early source material also came from Pakistani advertisements, as well as South Asian soap operas from the 1970s—images that surrounded him when he was growing up.
Eastern and Western references thus bustle and interact at the core of his work, highlighting the spaces where they collide or harmonize. In Aashiana (Hearth and Home), the image’s multifarious themes blend old and new. The family scene dominating the composition bears conspicuous affinities with the biblical tableaux highlighting the relationship between Mary and her son Jesus—notably Rubens’s tender formulation of the subject, residing at the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Peter Paul Rubens, Virgin with Child, circa 16th century, oil on canvas, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Image: Bridgeman Images.
Modernizing the familial theme and bringing light to current issues, Aashiana (Hearth and Home) presages Toor’s more recent works, of which the atmospheric feel presents a unique vision of the complexities and exchanges between South Asian popular culture and the art historical traditions of Western idealization. It specifically echoes the artist’s 9PM, The News, currently residing in the Tate, London, which similarly depicts a family sitting around a table, following their evening meal.
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