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 at Portsmouth Priory in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1933, he became an American citizen and a year later, matriculated at Harvard University, where he was exposed to primitive art at the Peabody Museum and met - among other artists - Jared French, George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus and engraver Eric Gill; three consecutive summers were spent at the later’s workshop, St. Dominic’s Guild, in Sussex, England. 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 began to explore abstraction, he formed vital relationships with Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet and he began to collect their work. In 1950, Ossorio returned to The Philippines for the first time since his childhood to execute a mural for the Chapel of St. Joseph the Worker. After spending much of 1951 in Paris with Dubuffet, Ossorio purchased the East Hampton estate known as “The Creeks,” which he cultivated into "the Eighth Wonder of the Horticultural World.” He remained in the Hamptons until his death in 1990, where he was a critical member of that avant-garde community, which included among others Willem DeKooning, Lee Krasner and Pollock. From 1951 to 1962, The Creeks housed Dubuffet’s extraordinary Art Brut collection and it is no coincidence that in the early 1960s, Ossorio began to create his own visionary assemblages which he labeled “congregations.” In his congregations, Ossorio combined disparate found objects - glass eyes, shells, animal bones, shards, pearls, driftwood – in an attempt to synthesize beauty with decay, refinement with crudeness.

Internationally recognized for his complex and challenging visual language, Ossorio has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications. His work is represented in museum collections throughout the world including Albertina Museum (Austria), Centre Georges Pompidou (France), L’Art Brut Museum (Switzerland), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Museo National Centre de Arte Reina Sofia (Spain), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1995, the Ossorio Foundation was established in Southampton, New York to interpret and preserve the rich legacy of Alfonso Ossorio.