Louis Fratino valuation

Louis Fratino was born in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1993, and grew up near Deale. After a fellowship at the Yale Summer School of Art and Music in Norfolk in 2014, he took a BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 2015, then went to Berlin on a Fulbright fellowship in painting and printmaking. He paints from memory. His early pictures were of his siblings, parents and childhood home, and his subjects are lovers, friends, family and himself, domestic interiors, still lifes, often of tables, and reclining nudes, with contemporary queer life and the male body at their centre. He works in oil on canvas and in pastel, makes drawings and bronze sculpture, and since 2020 has made large copperplate etchings with the printmaker Gregory Burnet. He showed at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, had his first institutional solo exhibition, Satura, at Centro Pecci in Prato, and in 2026 was paired with Henri Matisse at the Baltimore Museum of Art. His work is held by the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art and the British Museum. He lives and works in Brooklyn.

Fratino makes unique oil paintings, pastels and drawings, bronze sculptures and etchings. For an etching, note the edition number, the printer and the paper, and check the signature. Pastel smudges easily, so a pastel should stay framed under glazing, and a bronze should be checked for wear to its patina. For any work, a gallery invoice and the date of the work are the first things a buyer asks for.