David Zwirner is pleased to announce 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, Fratino interprets 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.
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.
photo: Jordan Weitzman
