Friedel Dzubas (1915–1994) was a self-taught painter whose work played an important role in the emergence of Color Field painting in the 1950s. Closely connected to the Abstract Expressionist milieu, he associated with artists and critics including Jackson Pollock, Clement Greenberg, and Helen Frankenthaler, with whom he shared a studio. Dzubas was an early and influential practitioner of stain painting. Experimenting with soaking diluted pigment into canvas in the late 1940s, he later became one of the first of the New York school artists to work with water-based acrylics. Whereas Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland typically worked on unprimed canvas, Dzubas adhered to the practice of coating his canvases with gesso, which absorbed his thinly applied paint almost immediately. Working with a brush rather than pouring the paint, he developed compositions in which areas of saturated color appear to emerge from the surface, balancing careful structure with the unpredictability of the medium. Born in Berlin in 1915, Dzubas fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and settled in New York. After working various jobs, including as a book designer, he became involved in the city’s avant-garde artistic and literary circles. In 1948, critic Clement Greenberg introduced him to Jackson Pollock, and in 1951 to Helen Frankenthaler. Dzubas had his first solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy in 1952 and went on to receive two Guggenheim Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Painting Fellowship. He taught at Cornell University and held artist-in-residence appointments at several institutions. His work was the subject of a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1983. Dzubas’s work is held in major public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Works

Graal Graal Graal Graal
Graal
1980
Promise Promise
Promise
1980
Henge Henge
Henge
1985
Hope Distant
Hope Distant
1987
Nightbird
Nightbird
1983
Alleman
Alleman
1973
Red Rock
Red Rock
1973
Untitled
Untitled
c.1975
Dark Journey
Dark Journey
1975
Untitled
Untitled
1975
Cross River
Cross River
1975
GTW-FD#6
GTW-FD#6
1987

Fairs

The Armory Show
Javits Center 655 W 34th Street
September 24 - September 27, 2026
Booth 202
The Armory Show

Public Collections

Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Brandeis University Rose Art Museum, Waltham
Castellani Art Museum, Lewiston
Dayton Art Institute, Dayton
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse
Florida Museum of Natural History, Gainesville
Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne
Georgia Museum of Art, Athens
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Hood Museum of Art, Hanover
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City
Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Newark Museum of Art, Newark
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh
Parrish Art Museum, Southampton
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Portland Art Museum, Portland
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven