Alfonso Ossorio’s “Congregations” at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery

Celebrating Alfonso Ossorio’s centennial birthday, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to present Alfonso Ossorio—Congregations: The First Decade, 1959-1969, an exhibition of twenty-four of the mixed-media assemblages coined by the artist as “congregations” that have become emblematic of Ossorio’s vision and capacity for innovation. This exhibition is the first to be dedicated exclusively to his congregations in almost two decades.

The illustrated catalogue for Alfonso Ossorio—Congregations: The First Decade, 1959-1969 will feature a full-text reprint of Forrest Selvig’s 1968 oral history interview with Ossorio for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. It was in this interview that Ossorio first publicly used the word “congregation” to refer to these assemblages. The choice of a word replete with associations to religious practice is appropriate given Ossorio’s lifelong relationship with Catholicism, but the significance runs deeper than its connection to worship (in fact, in Catholicism, “congregation” is rarely used in that sense). “Congregation” evokes a collective as well as the process of coming together. Thus, in addition to highlighting the spiritual themes that run through Ossorio’s entire body of work, “congregation” also reveals something about his aesthetic practice—how he conceives of artistic form and how he goes about putting a work of art together.