David Zwirner to Represent Louis Fratino, Painter of Queer Intimacy
With his fame fast rising, painter Louis Fratino has joined David Zwirner, one of the world’s biggest galleries. Rather than cutting ties with his past galleries, as many artists do when they join a mega-gallery like Zwirner, Fratino will still be represented by Berlin’s Galerie Neu and New York’s Sikkema Jenkins Malloy, which helped make the artist famous in the city he calls home. Working in vivid figuration, Fratino has memorably painted bathers, fornicating lovers, dancers, nude men in repose, and himself in his studio. He also periodically branched out into other genres, including still lifes and landscapes. Related Articles Fratino had already been on the ascent when he appeared in the 2024 Venice Biennale, in a part of Adriano Pedrosa’s main exhibition that paired his paintings with ones by Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar, who created erotically charged images of relations between men. This year, a Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition will set Fratino’s art in dialogue with work by Henri Matisse, the French modernist whose figurative paintings likewise simplified their subjects into curvaceous, clear …
