At the outbreak of World War II, German artist Friedel Dzubas (1915–1994) immigrated to the United States and quickly became a notable figure in the thriving New York City art scene. He shared a studio with none other than Helen Frankenthaler and was well acquainted with the leading critic of the era, Clement Greenberg. His work was exhibited by numerous influential gallerists—including Andre Emmerich, Tibor de Nagy, and Leo Castelli—and his career achieved a new high with a major retrospective in 1983 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Even so, following his death, Dzubas’s work fell into the margins of art history. The past decade, however, has witnessed a major resurgence in interest in his singular contributions to painting.
Opening September 11 and on view through November 8, 2025, New York’s Lincoln Glenn Gallery will stage a solo exhibition dedicated to the artist’s late career work with “The Slow Unfolding: Friedel Dzubas' Final Abstractns” Accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue featuring text by curator and critic Dan Cameron, the exhibition delves into the artist’s work dating from between 1980 and 1989, a period that marked the height of his explorations of gesture and color.
Like many of his contemporaries, including Frankenthaler, Dzubas favored Magna paint, a type of acrylic paint that could be thinned, allowing the pigment to saturate unprimed canvas and resulting in a more luminous finish and effect. Early in his career, he was associated with Color Field painting alongside artists like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, as well as Lyrical Abstraction, which was burgeoning in post-war France. Relying on preparatory sketches and maquettes to chart his painting course, his work from the 1960s and ’70s reflected the meticulous study of light, hue, and form.
In the 1980s, however, Dzubas incorporated spontaneity, improvisation, and a renewed enthusiasm for gesture, underpinned by his decades of technical and conceptual experience. While “The Slow Unfolding” features several smaller-scale works on paper, highlighting his continued experimentation with medium, but his large-scale canvases, such as Dawn (1984–85) or the monumental Barrier (1983), exemplify an unbridled embrace of the intuitive. The visual vocabulary he developed over the course of his career, such as bands of color and borderless forms, is present but with new energy and emphasis on movement and expressive gesture. Together, the works shown in Lincoln Glenn Gallery’s exhibition offer insight into the culmination of Dzubas’s life’s work.
