NEW YORK, NY.- Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is presenting Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved, a first-of-its-kind exhibition exploring the impact of the theories of Hungarian psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor on the art of Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990). Fodor’s 1949 book, The Search for the Beloved: A Clinical Investigation of the Trauma of Birth and Pre-Natal Conditioning (New York: Hermitage Press, Inc, 1949) was an early contribution to the field of prenatal psychology, and while many of his theories have lost their currency, the provocative language, vivid imagery, and theories put forth in the book provided Ossorio with, in his own words, “a springboard from which to take off.”[1] From his early surrealist drawings to his celebrated mixed-media assemblages known as Congregations, the works presented in Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved reveal Ossorio’s enduring exploration of themes addressed in Fodor’s book, notably birth, death, suffering, and sex.

In The Search for the Beloved, Fodor argues that prenatal experience and the inherently traumatic upheaval of birth form the foundation of each person’s psyche, instilling in them an innate fear of death and a lifelong, subconscious desire to return to the womb. In the book’s introduction, Fodor writes: “After nine months of peaceful development, the human child is forced into a strange world by cataclysmic muscular convulsions which, like an earthquake, shake its abode to the very foundations. … In its shattering effect, birth can only be paralleled by death.”[2]

Born in Beregszász, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Berehove, Ukraine) to a Jewish family in 1895, Nandor Fodor completed a doctorate in law at the Royal Hungarian University of Science in Budapest. After moving to London in 1929 to work as a journalist, Fodor became interested in the work of Sigmund Freud and began publishing his own writing in psychoanalytic journals. By 1949, when he published The Searched for the Beloved, Fodor had developed a reputation as a compelling psychoanalytic thinker writing for a popular audience. Many chapters of The Searched for the Beloved were first published in scientific journals, including The Psychiatric Quarterly, The American Journal of Psychotherapy, and The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Although it is unlikely that Fodor ever met Ossorio, his theories had an indelible influence on the artist, who was a voracious reader on a wide range of subjects; notably, Ossorio kept an annotated copy of The Search for the Beloved on his bedside table until the end of his life.

Alfonso Ossorio was born in Manila, the Philippines, in 1916 and raised in a devoutly Catholic family. After attending Catholic boarding schools in England and a Jesuit secondary school in the United States, he attended Harvard University, where he completed his senior thesis titled Spiritual Influences on the Visual Image of Christ. Throughout his youth, Ossorio’s irrepressible feelings of same-sex attraction were in conflict with the worldview of his upbringing and the beliefs that had been ingrained in him, leading to immense inner turmoil that he expressed through vividly detailed surrealistic depictions of biblical subjects during the early 1940s. An exemplary selection of these early works will be on view in Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved. Executed before the publication of The Search for the Beloved, these early drawings such as Job (1941) and The New Pandora (1944) reveal Ossorio’s lifelong interests in the themes of suffering, birth, and sex that would resonate with Fodor’s book.

Ossorio encountered Fodor’s book at a particularly important moment in his life and career. Early in 1950, Ossorio returned to his home in the Philippines for the first time since he was ten, bringing the newly published The Search for the Beloved with him. The official purpose of Ossorio’s trip was the execution of a mural titled The Angry Christ for the Chapel of Saint Joseph the Worker, which his family had built in Victorias, on the island of Negros. The ten months Ossorio spent in the Philippines opened up old wounds from his youth that led to a highly productive period and a new direction in his art.

Guided by his reading of The Search for the Beloved as well as his new friendships with Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet, Ossorio composed his Victorias Drawings, a series of abstract paintings on paper executed with a wax-resist technique, which are prominently featured in this exhibition. Distinguished by their vivid colors and pulsating energy, the Victorias Drawings directly address the contents of Fodor’s book through titles and imagery referencing pregnancy, childbirth, coupledom, motherhood, infancy, martyrdom, and yonic forms. Created at the height of the abstract expressionist movement, the Victorias Drawings inspired Dubuffet to author and publish a monographic study on the series, titled Peintures Initiatiques D’Alfonso Ossorio—the only monograph he would ever write on another artist. In 1951, the Victorias Drawings were exhibited at Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris and at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, formally announcing Ossorio’s departure from his detailed surrealist compositions of the 1940s.

Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved illuminates themes manifest throughout Ossorio’s oeuvre, including his final major series: the mixed media assemblages known as the Congregations. In the Congregations, Ossorio brings together such disparate found objects as glass eyes, shells, animal bones, shards of glass, and driftwood into compositions that reveal the enduring influence of Fodor’s thought.

Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved is Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s fourteenth solo exhibition on the work of Alfonso Ossorio, who has been the subject of more solo exhibitions than any other artist in the gallery’s thirty-six-year history. Beginning in 1996 with Alfonso Ossorio – Reflection & Redemption: The Surrealist Decade, 1939-1949, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has consistently presented focused, thematic exhibitions exploring various facets of Ossorio’s extraordinary career, while including his work in eighty-eight group exhibitions since 1992. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery represented the Ossorio Foundation from 1996 to 2007, and today proudly represents the Ossorio family-at-large.

1. Judith Wolfe, Alfonso Ossorio: 1940-1980 (East Hampton, NY: Guild Hall Museum, 1980), 43
2. Nandor Fodor, The Search for the Beloved, (New York: Hermitage Press, Inc., 1949), 3