Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love
Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love is a monograph produced in conjunction with the artist Salman Toor’s first retrospective exhibition. It collects Toor’s most essential works alongside significant new texts by exhibition curator Asma Naeem and critic Evan Moffitt, examining the works for their formal innovations and influences. Also included is an original short story by author Hanya Yanagihara, illustrated with Toor’s drawings.
Description text adapted from D.A.P.
More on the 2022 exhibition at The Baltimore Museum of Art
Photographs by Justin Lubliner
No Ordinary Love captures how Toor upends art historical traditions to center brown, queer figures and to investigate outdated concepts of power and sexuality. In his paintings, Toor captures moments of intimacy and tenderness between family members, friends, and lovers.
We aimed to echo his sensibilities through a soft gender-neutral palette and the use of the typeface Epicene. This display typeface manages to be elegant and flamboyant while still reading as elevated and, perhaps, proper.
Read more: Kris Sowersby of Klim Type writing about developing Epicene and its inspirations.
“To be epicene means to lack gender distinction, to have aspects of both or neither. In applying this notion to a typographic context, I am calling out the tendency that codes modern, functional or ‘neutral’ visual forms as ‘masculine’, while equating anything ornate or decorative with ‘feminine’ traits.”
