This self-portrait dates to the mid-1930s, when Dzubas was approximately twenty years old, making it a particularly compelling document of the artist before his emigration and decades before the mature abstractions for which he is best known. Created at a moment of extraordinary political and personal uncertainty, the portrait presents a young artist asserting himself with striking confidence. Dzubas depicts himself bare-chested, meeting the viewer directly with a slight grin. There is an almost defiant quality to the image—a young man attempting to define himself freely at precisely the moment when the world around him was increasingly restricting that freedom. Stylistically, the work also reveals his engagement with the German artistic traditions that preceded him.