Untitled, 1950

Alfonso Ossorio's "Untitled" (1950) is part of a significant body of work, known as the Victorias Drawings, that he produced between 1950 and 1951 during his return to the Philippines to complete a fresco mural for a Catholic chapel in Negros. This period proved to be one of the most productive stretches of his career, yielding a large output of works on paper exploring themes of childhood, birth, sexuality, mythology, and religion. "Untitled" (1950) is rendered on torn and shaped paper painted in shades of red, pink, and purple with spattered black marks distributed edge to edge, while looping white lines in a loose, unrestrictive hand echo a raw, child-like scrawl. Together, these layered gestures resolve into the faint form of a child or woman, making the piece a compact record of the influences and preoccupations that would define Ossorio’s mature practice.

Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990) spent his early childhood in the Philippines and was later sent to England for Catholic boarding school, before moving to the United States in 1930. By 1933, Ossorio had become a U.S. citizen, and the following year he enrolled at Harvard University to study fine art, later continuing his training at the Rhode Island School of Design. During his student years, Ossorio produced works that merged religious symbolism with Surrealist imagery. When World War II broke out, his skills were put to use as a medical illustrator in the Army.

By the late 1940s, Ossorio began moving toward abstraction. In 1949 he bought his first Jackson Pollock canvas and grew close with both Pollock and Lee Krasner. Ossorio’s earlier work, precise still lifes and portraits, once called a kind of super-realism, gave way to something looser and more inward-facing, shaped equally by Pollock and by the art brut painter Jean Dubuffet, whom he’d also begun collecting. A commission to paint a mural for the Chapel of St. Joseph the Worker brought Ossorio back to the Philippines in 1950. While there, old memories of racial prejudice, a strict Catholic upbringing, and unresolved feelings about his sexuality resurfaced. Ossorio stayed ten months in Victorias, Negros, working on the mural, and produced alongside it a striking run of wax-resist paper works charged with color and jagged energy known as the Victorias Drawings.

Through the rest of the decade Ossorio stayed active as both artist and curator, organizing shows featuring de Kooning, Rothko, and others, and running East Hampton’s Signa Gallery for several years. By the early 1960s he’d moved into assemblage, building dense works from glass eyes, shells, and driftwood that he termed “Congregations.” He kept exhibiting internationally until his death in 1990.

Ossorio is represented in numerous prestigious museum collections around the world, including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT); Art Institute of Chicago (IL); Ateneo Art Gallery, Ateneo de Manila University (Quezon City, Philippines); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam, The Netherlands); Brooklyn Museum (NY); Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France); Collection de l’Art Brut (Lausanne,Switzerland); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR); Harvard University Art Museums (Cambridge, MA); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid, Spain); The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC); National Museum of Modern Art (Kyoto, Japan); Parrish Art Museum (Water Mill, NY); Philadelphia Museum of Art (PA); The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC); Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich, Germany); Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University (Waltham, MA); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, National Galleries of Scotland (Edinburgh, United Kingdom); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Israel); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, CT); Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA); and Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University, (New Haven, CT)