The funeral of the Artist-Painter Gérard Fortuné who died on December 8th at the age of 84, will be sung in the St-Pierre church of Pétion-ville this Saturday December 14th, 2019 at 9:30 am. The remains will be exposed from 8:30 am. Interment will take place at Village W. Lamothe (Port-au-Prince)

Gérard Fortuné was born in 1924 in Montagne-Noire, in the heights of Pétion-ville. Coming from a modest family, he embarked on self-taught painting in the early 1980s.

During his visits to the Gallery of Issa El Saieh, he fell in love and was inspired by the works of artists like André Pierre, André Normil, the "Saint-Soleil" community or Hector Hyppolite. He quickly met personalities from the world of the visual arts who would constitute mentors for him : Michel Monnin, Nader, Judith Chambers among others.

An important figure in Haitian naive art, Gérard Fortuné's oil on canvas series help establish the myth of voodoo as the instigator of the Liberation of Haiti. His works have been exhibited internationally, and are included in the permanent collections of the Waterloo Center for the Arts in Iowa, the Huntington Museum of Art in Virginia, Ramapo College in New Jersey, as well as the Museum Collection of Art Patricia & Philip Frost of the International University of Florida and that of the Museum of Aquitaine in Bordeaux.

IH/ iciHaiti