Alfonso A. Ossorio
Alfonso Angel Yangco Ossorio (August 2, 1916 – December 5, 1990) was a Filipino American abstract expressionist performer who was born in Manila in 1916 to wealthy Filipino parents from the province of Negros Occidental. His stock was Hispanic, Filipino, and Chinese. Between the ages of eight and thirteen, he attended school 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 Good 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 action was surrealist. He was an devotee and early saver of the paintings of Jackson Pollock who counted him as a great friend, and whose works influenced and were influenced by Ossorio. He also acknowledged a entry between Pollock and the youth 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 to the lead 1950s, Ossorio was pouring oil and enamel paints onto canvas in the style of the first abstract expressionist pursuit 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 answer the reconstruction of the church built by the Czech architect Antonín Raymond. Ossorio had this to tell in a 1968 interview. "(The Angry Christ) is a continual last judgment taking into account the sacrifice of the lump that is the continual reincarnation of God coming into this world. And it worked out endearingly because the services take place usually certainly early because of the heat and the church had been oriented therefore that the sun would come in and strike the celebrant as he stood at the altar subsequent to this gigantic figure behind him. It worked, if I do say so myself. And although they loathed it at the period it was ended it is on now a place of pilgrimage."
Ossorio traveled to Paris to meet Jean Dubuffet in 1950. Dubuffet's raptness in art brut opened up supplementary vistas for Ossorio, who found forgiveness from society's preconceptions in the unstudied creativity of crazy asylum inmates and children. On the advice of Pollock, Ossorio purchased an spacious 60-acre (240,000 m2) estate, "The Creeks", in East Hampton in 1951, and lived there for over forty years. He fixed to house 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 next door to Dubuffet and approximately 140 extra artists in the Museum of Modern Art's 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage, which introduced the practice to a expansive public.
Ossorio died in New York City in 1990. Half his ashes were scattered at his grand land The Creeks and the other half came to dismount nine years well along at Green River Cemetery to the side of the remains of many other well-known artists, writers and critics. After his death, his assistant Edward "Ted" Dragon approved for the sale of The Creeks, eventually selling it to Ronald Perelman unchangeable with many of Ossorio's brightly colored found purpose art sculptures placed in in the midst of the groves of exotic evergreens that Ossorio had with intent planted in his conclusive 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 in the course of the public collections holding feign by Alfonso A. Ossorio.