Alfonso Ossorio | Biography | Hollis Taggart Galleries

Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990)

First-generation Abstract Expressionist painter, draughtsman, junk artist, and horticulturalist—Alfonso Ossorio produced a varied and highly original oeuvre during his fifty-year career. Just as the Manila-born, Harvard-educated, naturalized American citizen transcended national boundaries, his work broke with traditional artistic boundaries—and, as scholar B.H. Friedman surmised, established art historical categories “become richer in his hands.” (1) Celebrated especially for his expressively wrought paintings and vibrant assemblages of natural and manufactured materials, he lived from 1951 onward in the Southampton estate, “The Creeks,” where he formed part of a lively Hamptons community of artists that included such luminaries as Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner.

A treasure hunter, Ossorio culled his objects from everywhere: auctions, dental schools, bowling alleys, chemical factories, taxidermists, tourist shops, home sales. After arranging his selected items with a frame, he removed them to create the medium that would support them in their chosen arrangement. To do this, he often used Liquitex, an acrylic polymer emulsion, and Weldwood, a urea plastic glue, mixing into them different colors until he arrived the desired consistency and hue. Using a stick, he spread the liquid onto his base—usually plywood or masonite—and then, working from memory, pressed the larger objects and then smaller items into the plastic medium. After several hours of work, rearranging items, standing on his chair to get a better perspective, adding items to the composition, his congregation was complete.

Ossorio studied medieval art while he was an undergraduate at Harvard University, and even completed a senior thesis in 1938 on the “Spiritual Influences on the Visual Images of Christ.” His interest in manuscript illumination and wood engraving carried over into his early ink and watercolor drawings of the 1940s, and he betrays a particular debt to Albrecht Dürer. He even modifies the German’s German master’s monogram, the iconic A within the D design, to suit his own initials. While serving in the army from 1943 to 1946, he completed a series of drawings of medical surgeries and distorted bodies, which critics compared to the nightmarish projections of the medieval visionary, Hieronymous Bosch.

The artist also appreciated the Surrealist’s conjuring of fantasy worlds, and he admired the violent, instinctual aspects of outsider art. A trip in 1949 to Paris brought Ossorio into contact with Jean Dubuffet, with whom he developed a lasting friendship. In 1952 he installed Dubuffet’s collection of Art Brut (“raw art” or outsider art) and some of the French painter’s own work in his home and studio, The Creeks. This installation was captured by photographer Hans Namuth, author of the famous images of Jackson Pollock at work. Ossorio shared with Pollock and Clyfford Still an appreciation for the process of art as a sacred ritual, and saw himself within a continuing legacy, noting that “Pollock was carrying on exactly in the tradition I was interested in…like Celtic illumination.” (2)

In the late 1950s, the artist began to incorporate assorted elements—sand, glass, china, cheap jewelry, shells, gravel, coins, screws, metal disks, rope—into his paintings; two exhibitions, one at Betty Parson’s gallery in late 1959 and the other the following May at Galerie Stadler in Paris, revealed that Ossorio had moved beyond painting, through collage, into a new type of assemblage work. Also during the 1950s, Ossorio cofounded the Signa gallery in East Hampton, where he organized thematic, group exhibitions. He also exhibited his own work regularly, beginning in 1941 with his first solo show at Wakefield Gallery, New York. He became part of Betty Parson’s stable of artists, and held one-man exhibitions at her gallery in 1953, 1956, 1958, 1959, and 1961. In the 1960s, Cordier and Warren Gallery in New York, showed his art repeatedly.

In the mid-1960s and 1970s, Ossorio continued to toy with breaking the boundaries of the aesthetic container. He used square, round, oval and even octagonal designs as a support for his compositions, and even incorporated interior containers—often demarcated through bones, shells, and wood—within his larger framing devices. He also began to construct freestanding sculptures, such as Tree of Crosses (originally called Adam and Eve) and Land and Sea (1967; Guggenheim Museum). Some of these sculptures suggest powerful bodies, assuming talismanic properties. In 1970, he turned to the elegant gardens of The Creeks to create site-specific sculptures, working with the area’s natural elements such as foliage, wind, and water. Many of these feature large polychromed cement balls, sometimes with weather vanes or other lines of projection included, indications that “the sky is full of unknown microscopic forces, of multilayered winds,” the artist explains. (3)

His work is represented in international museum collections, among them the Albertina Museum, Vienna; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; L’Art Brut Museum, Lausanne, Switzerland; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art; Museo National Centre de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1995, the Ossorio Foundation was established in Southampton, New York to extend the artist’s legacy.

1. B.H. Friedman, Alfonso Ossorio (New York: Harry N. Abrams, [1973]), 32.
2. Klaus Kertess, “Eyewitnesses,” Alfonso Ossorio: Congregations (Southampton, N.Y.: Parrish Art Museum, 1997), 16.
3. Judith Wolfe, “Interview,” Alfonso Ossorio, 1940–1980 (East Hampton, N.Y.: Guild Hall Museum, 1980), 61.