With his fame fast rising, painter Louis Fratino has joined David Zwirner, one of the world’s biggest galleries. Rather than cutting ties with his past galleries, as many artists do when they join a mega-gallery like Zwirner, Fratino will still be represented by Berlin’s Galerie Neu and New York’s Sikkema Jenkins Malloy, which helped make the artist famous in the city he calls home.
Working in vivid figuration, Fratino has memorably painted bathers, fornicating lovers, dancers, nude men in repose, and himself in his studio. He also periodically branched out into other genres, including still lifes and landscapes.
Fratino had already been on the ascent when he appeared in the 2024 Venice Biennale, in a part of Adriano Pedrosa’s main exhibition that paired his paintings with ones by Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar, who created erotically charged images of relations between men.
This year, a Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition will set Fratino’s art in dialogue with work by Henri Matisse, the French modernist whose figurative paintings likewise simplified their subjects into curvaceous, clear forms.
In a statement, gallery founder David Zwirner said, “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.”
The gallery will bring Fratino’s art to Frieze Los Angeles this month, creating another market moment for an artist whose prices rose quickly during the early part of this decade. In 2022, Sotheby’s sold one of Fratino’s paintings for $738,000, a record for the artist who had at that time yet to turn 30. In 2024, Artnet News ran a story about Fratino’s market with the headline: “Louis Fratino Is a Star of the Venice Biennale. Good Luck Getting One of His Paintings.”
