Alfonso A. Ossorio: 21 interesting facts

Alfonso Angel Yangco Ossorio (August 2, 1916 – December 5, 1990) was a Filipino American abstract expressionist player who was born in Manila in 1916 to wealthy Filipino parents from the province of Negros Occidental. His line was Hispanic, Filipino, and Chinese. Between the ages of eight and thirteen, he attended speculative in England. At age fourteen, he moved to the United States. Ossorio attended Portsmouth Priory (now Portsmouth Abbey School) in Rhode Island, graduating in 1934. From 1934 to 1938, he studied fine art at Harvard University and subsequently continued his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. He became an American citizen in 1933 and served as a medical illustrator in the United States Army during World War II.

Ossorio’s early be in was surrealist. He was an enthusiast and early collector of the paintings of Jackson Pollock who counted him as a great friend, and whose works influenced and were influenced by Ossorio. He also traditional a gate between Pollock and the youngster gallery owner Paul Facchetti from Paris through the painter and art historian Michel Tapié. Facchetti realized Pollock’s first solo exhibition in Europe in 1952. In the at the forefront 1950s, Ossorio was pouring oil and enamel paints onto canvas in the style of the first abstract expressionist occupation in the US.

In 1950, he was commissioned by the parish of St. Joseph in Victorias City, Negros Occidental in the Philippines to complete a mural which would be known as “The Angry Christ” to unquestionable the reconstruction of the church built by the Czech architect Antonín Raymond. Ossorio had this to say in a 1968 interview. “(The Angry Christ) is a continual last judgment once the sacrifice of the growth that is the continual reincarnation of God coming into this world. And it worked out endearingly because the services take place usually entirely early because of the heat and the church had been oriented consequently that the sun would come in and strike the celebrant as he stood at the altar with this immense figure behind him. It worked, if I do tell so myself. And although they loathed it at the time it was over and done with it is re now a place of pilgrimage.”

Ossorio traveled to Paris to meet Jean Dubuffet in 1950. Dubuffet’s inclusion in art brut opened up other vistas for Ossorio, who found pardon from society’s preconceptions in the unstudied creativity of insane asylum inmates and children. On the advice of Pollock, Ossorio purchased an broad 60-acre (240,000 m²) estate, “The Creeks”, in East Hampton in 1951, and lived there for more than forty years. He contracted to home and display Dubuffet’s art brut collection there. In the 1950s, Ossorio began to create works resembling Dubuffet’s assemblages. He affixed shells, bones, driftwood, nails, dolls’ eyes, cabinet knobs, dice, costume jewelry, mirror shards, and children’s toys to the panel surface. Ossorio called these assemblages congregations, with the term’s obvious religious connotation.

Ossorio was represented closely Dubuffet and nearly 140 new artists in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage, which introduced the practice to a broad public.

Ossorio died in New York City in 1990. Half his ashes were scattered at his grand estate The Creeks and the new half came to stop nine years difficult at Green River Cemetery closely the remains of many other well-known artists, writers and critics. After his death, his partner in crime Edward “Ted” Dragon approved for the sale of The Creeks, eventually selling it to Ronald Perelman pure with many of Ossorio’s brightly colored found objective art sculptures placed in in the course of the groves of exotic evergreens that Ossorio had on purpose planted in his answer 20 years of life. Outside of The Creeks, Harvard Art Museum (Massachusetts), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Housatonic Museum of Art (Bridgeport, Connecticut) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.) are along with the public collections holding action by Alfonso A. Ossorio.