David Zwirner has 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, 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.
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.”
About the artist
Louis Fratino (b. 1993, Annapolis, Maryland) is known for intimate, sensuous paintings and works on paper that translate everyday life — lovers, interiors, domestic rituals — into quietly charged scenes of tenderness and desire. He received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 2015, following a place at the Yale Summer School of Art and Music (Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship) in 2014. In 2016, he was awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting and Printmaking, which took him to Berlin.
Fratino’s rise has been swift and international. His first solo exhibition, REASONS, took place at Platform Gallery, Baltimore, in 2016, and was followed by a steady run of presentations across Europe and the US, including Ciaccia Levi (Paris and Milan), Sikkema Malloy Jenkins (New York), Galerie Neu (Berlin), and Litografia Bulla (Rome). In 2024, the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato presented Satura, a major solo exhibition accompanied by a monograph published by Mousse. A focused presentation at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York, followed in 2025.
Fratino’s work featured in the Central Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere (2024), placing his deeply personal imagery within a broader global conversation. He has also participated in institutional group exhibitions at venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Musée Zadkine, Paris; and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, among others.
His work is held in major public collections worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; Tate-affiliated British Museum, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Museum Brandhorst, Munich.
Across painting, drawing and printmaking, Fratino has developed a distinctive visual language — tender yet unsentimental, classical in structure yet unmistakably contemporary — securing his position as one of the most compelling figurative painters of his generation
