{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":47378,"auction_id":95,"set_id":125,"lot_number":"129","artist":"Alfonso Ossorio (1916 - 1990)","title":"#12 '67 (\"Arimula\")","starting_price":2200000,"signed_dated":"1967 signed (lower right), dated and dedicated \"For Fernando Zobel\" (verso)","medium":"mixed media","size":"25\" x 13\" (64 cm x 33 cm)","property":"PROPERTY FORMERLY IN THE FERNANDO ZOBEL COLLECTION","coa":null,"provenance":"A gift from the artist to Fernando Zobel","exhibited":"Cordier & Ekstrom, 978 Madison Avenue, New York, March 1967","literature":null,"write_up":"Ossorio to Zobel : A Gift Exchanged Between Patrician Artists<br /><br />For Ossorio, the choice of the word “congregations” had religious resonance, his wild, weird and wonderful aggrupations were intended to be like a flock of the faithful, bound together in a single act of worship. In many ways, they were the sum total of his experiences as an artist, dating from his early years exploring primitive art at Harvard, his exposure to Celtic iconography, to the Filipino folk references in his St. Joseph the Worker murals, and to the experimentalist perspectives of Abstract Expressionism; even to his interactions with the mosaic tables create by Lee Krasner, Pollock’s widow, would figure into these works. For him,“congregations” were the three-dimensional progression of his earlier works. “There was no way of stirring things up enough by doing it with traditional means,” exclaimed Ossorio to one interviewer.<br /><br />This series returned Ossorio to his surrealist roots (although Ossorio would refuse to be be pigeonholed by that term), utilizing a variety of are objects (versus “found”). 12'67 (Arimula) his “Congregations” in full bloom as the works he showed in 1961, when he participated in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit, “The Art of Assemblage.”<br /><br />His other term for these obsessive treatments were “horror vacui” (the fear of empty spaces), filling like his good friend Pollock the “canvases” end to end, tampering with traditional vanishing points, breaking all the rules, and building them up again. He sought new materials and new effects. It was to become the style Ossorio for which would be best known (at least to a new generation of critics and collectors.<br /><br /> _______ <br /><br />Ossorio was born in Manila, on August 2, 1916, to a background as patrician as that of Fernando Zobel y Montojo, if not more so — if that were at all possible. Ossorio would be shipped off to various English boarding schools, before going to the United States, where his father had taken up permanent residence. He would be enrolled in the exclusive Portsmouth Priory, a Benedictine abbey, on Rhode Island. (Ossorio’s graduation from there would be mentioned in the same breath in the society pages alongside a lunch tendered by Mr and Mrs W.H. Vanderbilt on their yacht.)<br /><br /> In 1934, Alfonso entered the hallowed halls of Harvard University, emerging in 1938. He would take up residence a few years later in a ranch in New Mexico. There he would meet the gallerist Betty Parsons, also vacationing in the desert sands, a divorcee whose family had lost their fortune and is said to have hocked her engagement ring to bankroll her artistic career. Parsons would invite Ossorio to join her roster of artists, which eventually included Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, as well as the then-equally unknown Jackson Pollock, who would become a great friend and ally in the Abstract Expressionist movement.<br /><br />It would not at all be surprising that the paths of these worldly, artistic scions would cross. 12'67 Arimula (following Pollock’s penchant for coded numbers) would be testament to common horizons. Interestingly, there is a handle of a blackened silver spoon in this particular assemblage, possible a witty jibe at his fellow aristocrat for which this work was handpicked as a gift.<br /><br />Wrote the New York Times reviewing this very show where the work at hand appeared at Cordier & Ekstrom in 1967.“You would hardly think that Mr. Ossorio could have found the time, since his last show, to stick together the thousands of glass eyes, beads, mirrors, animal horns, shells and unidentifiable objects that make up his spectacular assemblages. But here is another big show in his devilishly gaudy manner. He seems more than ever to be creating decorations and votive objects for an expensive and highspirited pagan ritual — to be performed, of course, in the best company.” (Lisa Guerrero Nakpil)","lot_group":"Painting","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":4600000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":4600000,"userBid":5926,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":5527360,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":47068,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/95/125/lot/129.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":128,"next":130,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}