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 every day life to transmit a deeply felt response to his instant circumstances and the world past. His imaginative and prescient is channelled by 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 folks and locations round him, starting with himself and increasing to household, mates, companions and lovers, who he photos in inside areas from kitchens to bogs 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 photographs of intercourse and need 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 observe in addition to a serious contribution to the expression of queer id and sexuality in a painterly subject that has till current many years been dominated by heteronormative views.
Louis Fratino’s Richardson Road front room (2020) Assortment of Andre Sakhai © Louis Fratino
If there’s a philosophy in his portray, he says, it’s “about dwelling 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 traditional 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 provides entry to an enormous vary of worldwide cultural organisations by a single click on, with new guides being added frequently. They embody 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 can see a function on that present on the information when the exhibition opens. In the meantime, you may as well uncover the BMA’s different exhibitions, together with the acclaimed survey of one other main US figurative painter, Amy Sherald: American Chic. You’ll be able to 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 as well hear from Amy’s fashions and sitters, together with Michelle Obama.
