Now, a Fresh Look at Ossorio in a Sotheby's Gallery

Sotheby’s is a vast international company with many parts, but the auctioning of fine art has been its primary and most visible enterprise since 1744. The recent sale at auction of a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat for $110.5 million was international news. 

By comparison, S/2, its gallery devoted to the exhibition of modern and contemporary art, maintains a low profile. “Sotheby’s galleries are separate from the auction side of the business,” said Nicholas Cinque, the director of S/2. “We do curated exhibitions throughout the year. There is no bidding.”

Its current exhibition, on view through June 9, features 14 works of art by Alfonso Ossorio. Owner of the Creeks, a 57-acre estate on Georgica Pond in East Hampton, from 1952 until his death in 1990, Ossorio was an art collector and patron known especially for his friendship with Jackson Pollock and his early support of Pollock’s work.

Acknowledging Ossorio’s central role in the East End art community, Mr. Cinque, who has been at Sotheby’s for three years, said, “We wanted to pull the thread a little bit farther. After a great deal of discussion over many months with the Ossorio Foundation, we decided to do a survey of Ossorio’s work intended to define what an Ossorio looks like. People who have heard of Ossorio through his association with other artists don’t necessarily know about the range of his work.”

“He was really entrenched in the scene out here, working alongside the other artists as an equal. But his name has not been recognized as much as some of the legendary artists of his time. It should be.”

The exhibition draws from his three bodies of work: works on paper from the early 1950s, canvases from the ’50s and ’60s, and the assemblages he started working on in the late ’60s and continued through the end of his career, “as they grew in scale and intricacy,” according to Mr. Cinque, who worked closely with the foundation to determine the best examples of each period. A catalog accompanies the exhibition.

In 2013, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill organized “Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet,” which focused on the relationship among the three artists as well as their work.

“To me, that was the starting point in a lot of ways for a reconsideration of Ossorio’s work,” said Mr. Cinque. The show and the catalog demonstrated the belief of the two museums that Ossorio was the equal of the other two artists.

After calling the exhibition an “explosion” when it was at the Phillips Collection, Philip Kennicott, The Washington Post’s art critic, wrote, “And then there’s a second explosion, sparked by the least known of the three artists on display, Ossorio, who emerges not just as an important figure in the history of transatlantic intellectual ferment of the mid-20th century, but as a formidable, passionate, and moving artist in his own right.” 

“I think that exhibition really triggered a lot,” said Mr. Cinque. “The Whitney included Ossorio next to Pollock, and there was a range of other placements. And it was fantastic that it was at the Parrish, which owns quite a lot of Ossorio’s work and is less than 10 miles from where he lived.” 

S/2 mounts exhibitions throughout the year, except during the summer. “The focus is on looking to the past and mining art history for those moments or artists who played central roles but have been obscured in some way. We’re part of the Sotheby’s family, but we come at art in a very different way from the auction house.”

He also noted that being in the same building as the auction house means that the gallery gets plenty of traffic. “You get a lot of eyes coming into the building, whether it’s to see Ossorio or a Max Ernst bronze or Basquiat. Exhibitions are often synced up with what else is going on in the building.”

Although he majored in English at Emory University, Mr. Cinque, who is an Amagansett native and attended the Ross School, began to collect and trade art books when he was young. He also read auction catalogs, which are designed to excite the reader about a subject, whereas galleries’ catalogs take a more scholarly approach.