Louis Fratino was born in 1993 in Annapolis, Maryland, US, and lives in New York. His work mirror on reminiscence and the intimate particulars of day by day life to transmit a deeply felt response to his instant circumstances and the world past. His imaginative and prescient is channelled via an abiding ardour for artwork historical past, and notably Modernist painters in Europe and the US.
Louis Fratino’s Tom (2019) Assortment Arturo Herrera, Berlin © Louis Fratino
Louis’s topics are the individuals and locations round him, starting with himself and lengthening to household, buddies, companions and lovers, who he photos in inside areas from kitchens to loos and bedrooms, in addition to within the metropolis and in nature. Essential to his artwork is an exploration of queer life, from touching scenes of companionship to pictures of intercourse and want extra broadly. Louis’s portray possesses an on a regular basis poetry but dwells on the large questions of life. It’s a singular and deeply private follow in addition to a serious contribution to the expression of queer id and sexuality in a painterly discipline that has till current many years been dominated by heteronormative views.
Louis Fratino’s Richardson Avenue lounge (2020) Assortment of Andre Sakhai © Louis Fratino
If there’s a philosophy in his portray, he says, it’s “about residing very intensely” and being “very open to experiences”. He displays on the steadiness between actuality and fantasy in his portray, on how reminiscence is the principal topic of his work, and the way he enjoys the “feeling of play in portray”. He discusses artists from Henri Matisse, with whom he has a present on the Baltimore Museum of Artwork between March and September, to Bhupen Khakhar and Winifred Nicholson, the photographer George Platt Lynes, the poet Sandro Penna and the film-maker Dag Johan Haugerud. Plus, he provides perception into life in his studio and solutions our typical questions, together with the final word: what’s artwork for?
• Fratino and Matisse: To See This Gentle Once more, Baltimore Museum of Artwork, US, 11 March-6 September
This podcast is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, the humanities and tradition platform. Bloomberg Connects gives entry to an enormous vary of worldwide cultural organisations via a single click on, with new guides being added recurrently. They embrace a number of establishments the place Louis Fratino has proven his work, together with the Venice Biennale, the FLAG Artwork Basis in New York, ICA/Boston and the Baltimore Museum of Artwork (BMA), the place the exhibition Fratino and Matisse: To See This Gentle Once more is on view between March and September of 2026. Discover Bloomberg Connects and you will see a characteristic on that present on the information when the exhibition opens. In the meantime, you may also uncover the BMA’s different exhibitions, together with the acclaimed survey of one other main US figurative painter, Amy Sherald: American Chic. You may hear Amy and different commentators, together with the BMA’s director Asma Naeem and the present’s curator Cecilia Wichmann, talk about the thesis of the present and particular person works intimately. And you may also hear from Amy’s fashions and sitters, together with Michelle Obama.
