Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to present its eighth solo exhibition featuring the work of Filippino-born artist Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990). This exhibition, presented in conjunction with the Ossorio Foundation, is a comprehensive survey of the artist’s evolving career. Simultaneously on view at both Michael Rosenfeld Gallery and the Ossorio Foundation, this exhibition will include approximately forty-five works dating from 1936 to 1990.

The exhibition title, Horror Vacui, derives from the term’s first use in connection with Ossorio by biographer B.H. Friedman, who sought to describe that particular combination of Ossorio’s psyche and artistic versatility, which consistently produced compositions devoid of empty space. Ossorio’s early exposure to primitive art at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University and his later co-founding role in the organization L’Art Brut in America, enabled him to attain fluency in the “prodigiously fecund” language of the authentic visionary. Though the aversion to empty space signified by horror vacui usually connotes a fear of such spaces, in Ossorio’s case, it should be understood as stemming from a daring to fill space.

Alfonso Ossorio was born in Manila in the Philippines and was educated in Catholic boarding schools in England before coming to the United States in 1930 to continue his studies. In 1933, he became an American citizen and a year later, matriculated at Harvard University, where he met - among other artists - Jared French, George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus and engraver Eric Gill. Actively working by the early 1940s in the tradition of Surrealism, Ossorio had his first solo exhibition in 1941 at Betty Parsons’s legendary Wakefield Gallery in New York City. In 1943, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as a medical illustrator. After his discharge from the army in 1946, he moved to New York City just as the Abstract Expressionist movement was beginning to emerge. In the late 1940s, as Ossorio