Alfonso A Ossorio (1916 - 1990)
Abstract
Signed lower right
Oil on Board
Painting Size: 22 x 18 in.
Frame Size: 23 1/2 x 19 1/2 in.
Created in Circa 1950s.
CONDITION
Great Condition
PROVENANCE
Private Collection from Pennsylvania.
Biography from the Archives of askART
Alfonso Ossorio in his painting showed his predilection for the art brut ("raw art") of the insane, criminals and children espoused by Jean Dubuffet who was a major influence on Ossorio from the age of thirty-three. For him, like many of his contemporaries, rational society, traditional art and existence failed to have meaning, which he sought in the darker avenues of the human spirit and the spontaneous, unpremeditated creations of innocence. Ossorio was also influenced by his friend Jackson Pollock, as well as Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso.
Ossorio, the son of a wealthy sugar planter, was born in Manila, on the island of Luzon in the Philippines in 1916, becoming an American citizen in 1939. Educated in England and the United States, he studied at Harvard and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Ossorio eventually moved from painting to sculptural assemblage or junk art, utilizing a wide variety of objects including toys, broken glass, skeletons and glass eyes. He called this gathering of objects "congregations."
After the Second World War and his experiences in the medical corps, understandably resulting in morbid imagery, he began a study of religious iconography, which figured, in 1950, in a mural for the Church of St. Joseph in the Philippines.
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Excellent