FORTIER, Louis (1962)

Louis Fortier is a sculptor born in Quebec City and is currently working at Montreal. Louis Fortier obtained a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from University of Laval in 1991 and also a master’s degree in visual arts from the University of Quebec at Montreal, few years later in 1994. During his professional career, he participated in several projects of solo and collective exhibitions all around Quebec, such as the exhibition La tête au ventre presented at Concordia University’s Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery in 2007, the Hot Wax exhibition at the Rooms Art Gallery in St-John’s (Newfoundland) the same year or Cesar and Me exhibition (2009) at the Donald Brown Gallery. In the recent years, Louis Fortier works exclusively from his own face, which he molds extensively, constituing the generic pattern of an important serie of sculptures, each one different by their distortions. By offering galleries of portraits, his artwork proposes a sociological study of psychological characters that faces with surprising physiologies revealing states of souls. Between the unpredictable condition of the materials, like plaster or wax, and the ephemeral nature of emotions, the artist gives to his self-portraits a greater emotional charge by working the excess of deformations, like the everyday life and its fleeting accidents. Otherwise, Louis Fortier received several grants, including those of Council of Arts and Letters of Quebec and Council of Arts of Canada, and moreover, many of his works are part of the collection of National Museum of Fine Arts of Canada.