Artwork
Biography
Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994) was a German-born American abstract painter. Friedel Dzubas studied art before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and settling in New York City. In Manhattan during the early 1950s, he shared a studio with fellow abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler; it was during this time he started exhibiting his Abstract expressionist paintings. His work was included in the Ninth Street Show in New York City in 1951, and in group exhibitions at the Leo Castelli gallery, the Stable Gallery, and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery among others.
Dzubas was a pioneer of Color-Field painting alongside Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland. He developed his signature, vibrant style, scrubbing thick layers of color into large canvases. It was in 1966 that Dzubas abandoned oils for synthetic acrylic colors. He would utilize "Magna" acrylic for the remainder of his career. Such flattened fields of hue were theorized by celebrated critic Clement Greenberg as examples of "Post Painterly Abstraction" or generally, "Color-Field" painting.
His painting process created fields of dense color and other areas where the color seemed almost translucent; for Dzubas, these paintings referenced natural phenomena, emotion, the painterly gesture, and the experience of color itself. His work is held in numerous private and public collections.
