Louis Fratino, The Art of Closeness

David Zwirner presents Louis Fratino’s first solo exhibition in the UK. The exhibit brings together an entirely new body of paintings and continues Fratino’s exploration of the figure, personal relationships and scenes from everyday life. Born in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1993 and now based in New York, Fratino studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and received a Fulbright Fellowship in 2016 to study painting and printmaking in Berlin. Working across painting, drawing and sculpture, he frequently addresses contemporary queer life and the male body through subjects drawn from his own experience and the people around him. His figurative language, characterised by intense colour and simplified forms, also reflects a sustained engagement with the history of Western art, from early painting to modernism. The London exhibition expands this repertoire, moving between public and private life. Domestic interiors, bodies, gestures and ordinary situations remain the starting point for paintings in which intimacy does not necessarily coincide with portraiture. Observations of people and places are reworked through artistic and literary references and a particular attention to the construction of the painted surface. In recent years Fratino has gained increasing institutional recognition. In 2024 his work was shown in the Central Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale - Foreigners Everywhere, while Centro Pecci in Prato presented his solo exhibition Satura. In 2025, Spotlight followed at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York. In 2026, the Baltimore Museum of Art brought his work into direct dialogue with Henri Matisse in Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again, juxtaposing figures, interiors, still lifes and self-portraits by the two artists. In London, Fratino returns to the subjects that have defined his recent painting: the body, physical and emotional proximity, and the spaces of everyday life, approached through a figurative language that brings personal experience into dialogue with the history of art.