Louis Fratino
the United States
b.1993
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 received his BFA in Painting with a 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 first institutional solo exhibition, Louis Fratino Satura,was held at Centro Pecci in May 2025. In 2024, Fratino’s paintings were featured in the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa.
Fratino’s work is included in the collections of major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), and the Hammer Museum.
