Louis Fratino

Born in Annapolis, Maryland, Louis Fratino’s paintings, drawings and sculptures often feature tender scenes of coalescing figures in domestic, interior spaces. After receiving his Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, in 2015, Fratino would go to pursue a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting and Printmaking in Berlin. Emotionally charged with a distinct atmospheric quality, Fratino’s paintings draw upon motifs and visual cues from art history. Often compared to Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, Fratino’s semi-Cubist style renders the Male nude in a kaleidoscopic patchwork of geometric shapes. In a presentation traditionally reserved for the female nude, Fratino’s work centers the queer male body in senual, domestic scenes. The artist has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions including Them at Perrotin, New York in 2019, and Good Pictures at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, New York in 2020, and has begun to take on solo exhibitions at prominent galleries such as his recent Growths of the Earth at the Ciaccia Levi, Paris in 2021 and Morning at Sikkima, Jenkins Co. in 2019. The artist now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.