Ossorio’s 100th year marked with landmark exhibit
MANILA, Philippines – To celebrate the 100th birth year of the extraordinary artist Alfonso Ossorio, Leon Gallery presents “Afflictions of Glory,” on view from Feb. 6 to 22 at Leon Gallery, ground floor, Corinthian Plaza, 120 Paseo de Roxas, Legaspi Village, Makati City.
The exhibition features 15 works, representative of Ossorio’s various periods as an artist. It is also the first exhibit of Ossorio’s work in the country. “Afflictions of Glory” is curated by Liliane Rejante Manahan and Lisa Guerrero Nakpil.
Alfonso Ossorio is arguably considered by critics today as the most colorful, prolific, and imaginative artist to emerge from the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1950s. It was Abstract Expressionism that singlehandedly moved the center of gravity of art, for the first time, from Europe to the United States of America. At the time, Ossorio was overshadowed by his contemporaries, who included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, among others.
Ossorio’s talent burned bright — and long — even after the men of Abstract Expressionism had fallen by the wayside. He continued avidly to keep pace with the changing temper of the international art scene well into his last decade of the 1980s.
In recent years, he has been increasingly recognized for his fascinating originality. In 2013, he was part of an important exhibit at the Phillips collection in Washington, D.C., titled “Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, and Dubuffet,” which placed him squarely in the intersection between the two most influential artists of that generation.
Always exhilarating, hardly commonplace, Ossorio and his art is one of the most enduring tales of modern art.
Born on Aug. 2, 1916 in Manila, the sixth son of Don Miguel José Ossorio and Doña Maria Paz Yangco, Alfonso was heir to a vast shipping and sugar fortune. At an early age, he was shunted around various English and American boarding schools, finishing at Harvard and the Rhode Island School of Design in 1939. Along the way, he became an American citizen in 1933.
After nearly a quarter-century, Ossorio would return to the Philippines in 1949. He had been commissioned by his family to create a mural for the Chapel of Saint Joseph the Worker, in distant Victorias town in the province of Negros Occidental. (Manahan is currently leading the team involved in its conservation and restoration.)
Agonizing over how his past had dealt him a cruel blow, idealizing on what could have been, struggling between the implications of the mural’s religious theme and his own conflicts, all these translated themselves into a pained but creative awakening.
The months he spent in Victorias birthed a new technique, a new form of expression, evidenced by the many paintings he produced in the quiet evenings when at work on the church mural. His “inner conversations,” as he called them, would evolve and refine themselves through the years, autobiographical as they were, brilliant yet tormented, eventually securing his position in the firmament of art greats and, in retrospect, bringing his afflictions to glory.
Jean Dubuffet, founder of the movement “Art Brut” (Raw Art), took the time to write an entire book on Ossorio’s intensely moving works titled Les Peintures Initiatiques d’Alfonso Ossorio (The Initiatory Paintings of Alfonso Ossorio). Three of the works from that book are featured in the “Afflictions of Glory” exhibit, as well as other, along with other gems from this critical period.
Ossorio was recently included in the inaugural exhibit of the Whitney Museum of American Art, focusing on 407 artists pivotal to the United States art landscape. His work fittingly hangs beside Jackson Pollock. Companion pieces from the same series as in the Whitney Museum are likewise featured in the exhibit.
For inquiries, email info@leon-gallery.com.
