Louis Fratino

Louis Fratino creates deeply intimate paintings and drawings from personal memory and the quietly sublime offerings of everyday life. His figurative subjects include lovers, friends, family, and the artist himself, rendering the human body as a site of vast emotive expression. Sexuality, intimacy, and queer desire are understood as natural and constant, suffusing the atmosphere of his scenes in vibrant and comforting familiarity. Invoking an art historical lineage of modernist painters—including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe— Fratino’s work mines the possibilities of communion and connection, amplified through the seductive power of the painted surface.

Louis Fratino (b. 1993, Annapolis, MD) received his BFA in Painting with concentration in Illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD (2015). He is a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting, Berlin (2015-16) and a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship, Norfolk, CT in 2014. His work is included in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. Fratino lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.