In portraying all manner of subjects drawn from his immediate circle and from observation, he pairs an exuberant palette of bold, high-contrast colors with expressive figuration that reflects his considered study of art history and literature.

”It is important for me to maintain a kind of vulnerability. I mean, it’s kind of a loaded word, vulnerability, but I think that it’s important to make an artwork. It’s so important for me to feel not embarrassed by anything. Like, how could you embarrass yourself in a kind of mental dialogue that you’re having with yourself? In that way, my studio is a kind of sacred space.”

”The best things that happen in the studio are always the things where you’re like: did I do that? How could I have done that? And sometimes I have these nightmares that I’ve got to remake something, but I have no idea how I would.”

”In our memory or in our lived experiences, it can be painful to experience something that… is so beautiful but that you know is already ending the moment you’re able to recognize that it’s even happening. It’s kind of already gone. That could be light on a wall or touching someone or traveling somewhere, and I feel like painting, which is such a slow process and takes so much kind of repeated physical effort, is kind of this way of being in those spaces or spending that time over and over again.”

Louis Fratino (b. 1993) was born in Annapolis, Maryland. He received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 2015 and works and lives in New York. In 2014, Fratino was selected to participate in the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship at the Yale Summer School of Art and Music in Norfolk, Connecticut. In 2016, he received a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting and Printmaking to study in Berlin. Fratino has been the subject of numerous solo and two-person global exhibitions. In 2024, the solo presentation Satura was held at Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, Italy. The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated monograph printed by Mousse Publishing. Spotlight: Louis Fratino was presented at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York in 2025. A two-person presentation placing Fratino’s work in dialogue with that of Henri Matisse was on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2026. The artist’s work was presented in the Central Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, in 2024. Fratino has also been included in group exhibitions at institutions worldwide, including FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Musée Zadkine, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Rudolph Tegners Museum og Statuepark, Dronningmølle, Denmark; Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, The Netherlands; and Museum Brandhorst, Munich.

Work by Fratino is held in numerous institutional collections, including Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; British Museum, London; Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Louis Fratino was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in his studio in Brooklyn, New York. The conversation took place in June 2026.

Camera: Sean Hanley
Edited by: Nanna Dahm
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026
Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond.