Louis Fratino
Louis Fratino (b. 1993) 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 expressive figuration that cites his considered study of classical and modern Western art history and literature.
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Biography
Louis Fratino, 2025 by Jordan Weitzman
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.
The artist lives and works in New York.
