‘Louis Fratino would like to get intimate’ by Simon Chilvers
2024
Louis Fratino’s paintings cover intense and often tender nudes, tables laden with artefacts, tangled limbs and sex, portraits of his mother and still lifes of flowers from his garden in Brooklyn. Aged only 30, the American has already been compared to Picasso, Pierre Bonnard and Lucian Freud. His first small show, With everyone, at Thierry Goldberg in New York in 2016, sold out. Subsequently, institutions have been acquiring: there are two works in the Whitney’s permanent collection, while Red nude (After Mafai), 2023, was recently purchased by the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Likewise, his work is selling consistently above expectations at auction (he is represented by Sikkema Jenkins in New York). In November 2022, An Argument, 2021, sold at Sotheby’s for $730,800 against estimates of $200,000–$300,000. Earlier this year, Flower Market, 2022, more than doubled predictions at Christie’s, selling for $504,000. He is currently showing a small survey of his work at the Venice Biennale, and this month, his first solo institutional show of more than 50 works, Satura, opens in Tuscany at the Centro Pecci, featuring new paintings alongside sculpture, sketchbooks and lithographs.
Read more at Financial Times.