NEW YORK, NY.- David Zwirner announced the representation of New York–based artist Louis Fratino (b. 1993). At Frieze Los Angeles later this month the gallery will feature new paintings by the artist. Fratino's first solo exhibition with the gallery will be in London in Fall 2026. An upcoming exhibition Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again, which places the two artists in dialogue, will open at the Baltimore Museum of Art in March 2026. Fratino is also represented by Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York, and Galerie Neu, Berlin.
Fratino creates paintings, drawings, and sculptures that depict intimate personal experiences and domestic affairs, frequently centering contemporary queer life and the male body. In portraying all manner of subjects garnered from his immediate circles and through observation, he connects an exuberant palette of bold, high-contrast colors with an expressive figuration that cites his considered study of classical and modern Western art history and literature. His compositions recall the beauty of ancient Greek kouroi and references from Christian iconography while synthesizing and recasting the techniques and styles of a wide range of painters such as Pablo Picasso, Marsden Hartley, Alice Neel, Georgia O’Keeffe, Dana Schutz, Yannis Tsarouchis, and Christopher Wood, among others. The artist illuminates relations between his subjects—familial, romantic, fraternal, erotic—to reveal the pleasures and tensions that operate within private spheres, as well as distinct social and cultural tremors that reverberate throughout public life and determine how difference is navigated. In his work, Fratinointerprets these storied pasts and approaches anew, his striking compositions simultaneously proposing tender portraits of those around him and uncovering expansive links to narratives across time.
As Virginia M. G. Anderson, curator of American Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, has written, “Fratino holds prosaic subjects up to the light to reveal how our loves, our secrets, our senses of self are contained in the little moments of daily life: the weeds in the yard, the seashells lined up on a windowsill, or the dirty dishes in the sink. As an integral part of this everyday life, sex figures into his oeuvre assimultaneously emotional, erotic, vulnerable, and joyfully mundane. . . . Very much an artist of his generation, Fratino interrogates and counters conventional expectations about normative sexual relationships. At the same time, his work is in active dialogue with the history of both European and American modernist art.”
David Zwirner states, “I am thrilled to welcome Louis Fratino to the gallery. His sensual and erotic paintings are impossible to ignore, they inevitably draw you in and confront you. To my eyes his powerful art is truly of our time – or maybe I should say of his time – challenging us to come to embrace an intimacy and a sensuality that has not found its way into the canon yet. Meeting Lou, I was impressed by his deep knowledge of the history of painting, and in particular his curiosity for the artists that came before him and their depictions of queer life. For him, artmaking is both past and present—looking back and looking forward simultaneously—capturing his own experiences, memories, and feelings, while inviting us to project our own. I’m looking forward to presenting his new work at Frieze LA in a couple of weeks, and his forthcoming solo exhibition at our London gallery this fall.”
Louis Fratino was born in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1993. He received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, in 2015. In 2014, Fratino was selected to participate in the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship at Yale Summer School of Art and Music, Norfolk, Connecticut, and, in 2016, he received a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting and Printmaking to study in Berlin.
Fratino has been the subject of numerous solo and two-person global exhibitions. His first solo presentation, REASONS: Works by Louis Fratino, was held at Platform Gallery, Baltimore, in 2016. Additional exhibitions of his work have been presented at Cabinet Printemps, Düsseldorf (2017); Ciaccia Levi, Paris (2018, 2019, 2021) and Milan (2022); Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York (2019, 2020, 2021, and 2023); Galerie Neu, Berlin (2022, 2025), and Litografia Bulla, Rome (2023), among others.
In 2024, the solo presentation Satura was held at Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, Italy. The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated monograph printed by Mousse Publishing. Spotlight: Louis Fratino was presented at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York, in 2025.
The artist’s work was presented in the Central Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, in 2024. Fratino has also been included in group exhibitions at institutions worldwide, including FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Musée Zadkine, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Rudolph Tegners Museum og Statuepark, Dronningmølle, Denmark; Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, The Netherlands; and Museum Brandhorst, Munich.
Work by Fratino is held in numerous institutional collections, including Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; British Museum, London; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
