Blue-chip gallery David Zwirner has announced New York-based artist Louis Fratino as the newest member of their roster. His first solo show with Zwirner will take place in London this fall, and new paintings by the fast-rising star will be on view later this month in their Frieze Los Angeles booth. Sikkema Malloy Jenkins will continue to represent the artist in New York, while Galerie Neu will do so in Berlin.
“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 embrace an intimacy and a sensuality that has not found its way into the canon yet,” said David Zwirner in a statement.
Born in Annapolis, Maryland in 1993, Fratino is known for his intimate depictions of men, which capture the tenderness of everyday queer life. He works across painting, drawing, and sculpture, using vivid palettes to form lively, curvaceous compositions. His paintings reference the techniques and styles of painters past and present, including Alice Neel, Dana Schutz, and Christopher Wood, among others.
Fratino received his BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2015. The year prior, he was selected to participate in the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship at Yale’s Summer School of Art and Music, and in 2016, he received a Fulbright Research Fellowship to study painting and printmaking in Berlin. Since then, he has presented solo and two-person exhibitions at galleries including Ciaccia Levi, Cabinet Printemps, and Litografia Bulla. In 2024, a selection of his paintings were included in the Central Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. And next month, an exhibition titled “Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again” will open at the Baltimore Museum of Art and place the eponymous artists in dialogue.
“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,” said Virginia M. G. Anderson, the Baltimore Museum of Art’s curator of American Art. “As an integral part of this everyday life, sex figures into his oeuvre as simultaneously emotional, erotic, vulnerable, and joyfully mundane.” Anderson also called Fratino “very much an artist of his generation.”
