The art of Alfonso Ossorio can be frightening. Chaos in hot colors with burning eyes. Human forms bulging with scribbled teratomas. Crowded assemblages—he called them “Congregations”—that seem to be leaping off the wall. Born in the Philippines in 1916, Ossorio’s family moved to the U.S. when he was 14; in the 1930s, he studied fine art at both Harvard and the Rhode Island School of Design. Ossorio’s painting moved from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism, and then in the 1950s, influenced by Jean Dubuffet and art brut, a primal energy emerged. This exhibition takes its title from a 1949 book by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor, an exploration of pre-natal psychology and especially the effect of birth, an earthquake after the paradisiacal peace of the womb. “In its shattering effect,” Fodor wrote, “birth can only be paralleled by death.” Ossorio, who died in 1990, called the book “a springboard from which to take off.” —Laura Jacobs