Friedel Dzubas American, 1915-1994

Friedel Dzubas was an American-German painter celebrated among the second generation of Abstract Expressionists in mid-century New York, following his flight from Nazi Germany in 1939. By the mid-1960s, Dzubas had switched from oil to acrylic paint, creating what critic Clement Greenberg called Post-Painterly Abstraction. This style eschewed expressionistic brushwork, turning instead to a new “cool,” surface flatness attained by pouring, sponging, and spraying acrylic paint. This was employed by his contemporaries such as Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, the latter with whom Dzubas shared a studio in 1952. In contrast to these artists, however, Dzubas achieved a similar continuous plane by retaining the traditional use of brushes and gesso ground. First working his composition on a small canvas, the artist would then render it at a monumental size. Dzubas’s distinctive color lozenges, surrounded by brushed color fields, take on a directional force through his signature dry-brushed feathering at one end. Born on April 20, 1915 in Berlin, Germany, Dzubas held over 60 solo exhibitions during his lifetime with New York galleries Knoedler Contemporary Art and André Emmerich Gallery. He also obtained numerous awards including two consecutive Guggenheim Fellowships in 1966–1968, and taught at prominent institutions such as Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Cornell University in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Dzubas died on December 10, 1994 in Auburndale, MA at the age of 79.