Born in Berlin in 1915, Friedel Dzubas fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and settled in New York in the late 1940s, joining a coterie of leading young painters that included Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler with whom he shared a studio. Mostly working on unprimed canvas, Dzubas applied wide, thick strokes of paint over areas glazed in thin washes, forging a figure/ground relationship in which pictorially emphatic elements seem to be suspended before or above a murky depth. While largely nonrepresentational, even when bearing titles with which their compositions might be identified, the paintings seem full of natural forces like wind and water, and to be governed by the pull of gravity.

Associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionism, Dzubas was a proponent of color-field painting.  The worked surfaces and "all-overness’ of his painted canvases suggest that “surface-ness” is not an attribute of color but rather that color is a property of surfaces. He exhibited a preference for clear, discrete, and contrasting areas of hue in thin layers. In the 1970s, he began filling surfaces with large, rounded rectangular patches of loosely painted multi-colored strokes as if painted with a huge brush. Positioned in loose right angles, the patches vary in size, direction, and color in order to generate contours and color changes, in effect, providing pictorial "drama." Working with a quick-drying Magna paint, Dzubas shaded the color patches according to lateral extension, as opposed to being modeled in relation to contour, as a way of asserting the flatness of the canvas. Forms both define and enliven the surface; in this work, the perpetual roll of the circular format is anchored by verticals and horizontals.

1915     Born in Berlin German

1994     Died in the United States

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS & AWARDS

2013     Baker Sponder Gallery, Boca Raton, FL

2008     Leslie Feely Fine Art, New York, NY

2005     Katonah Museum of Art, Westchester, NY

2004     Jacobson Howard Gallery, New York, NY

2001     Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

1998     Elaine Baker Gallery, Boca Raton, Florida

            Tufts University Gallery, Medford, Massachusetts

            Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA,

1993     Jaffe Baker Gallery, Boca Raton, Florida

1990     Ann Jaffe Gallery, Bay Harbor Island, Florida

            Gallery One, Toronto, Canada

1989     Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, New York

1988     Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

            Harcus Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts

            Garner Tullis, New York, New York

1987     Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, New York

            Nassau County Museum of Fine Art Association, Nassau County, New York

            Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithica, New York

            Meredith Long and Company, Houston, Texas

1986     Hokin Gallery, Palm Beach, Florida       

            M. Knoedler and Company, New York, New York

1985     M. Knoedler and Company, New York, New York

            Gallery One, Toronto, Canada

1968     National Council on the Arts

1968-6  John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship

1966     Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Painting

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

California                   

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Connecticut               

Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art; Yale University Museum

Florida                        

Florida University

Indiana                       

Fort Wayne Art Museum

Iowa                           

Iowa State University

Maryland                    

Baltimore Museum of Art

Massachusetts             

Boston Museum of Fine Art; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University; Wellesley College Museum

New Hampshire          

Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College

New Jersey                 

Newark Museum; Princeton University Museum; Rutgers Art Gallery

New York                                

Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Everson Museum of Art; NYU Art Museum;

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Whitney Museum American Art

Ohio                           

Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College

Dayton Art Institute; Tennessee Brooks Memorial Art Gallery

Texas                           

Houston Museum of Fine Arts

Washington D.C.        

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution

National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution                         

Phillips Collection