Artists & Works

STYLE: COLOR FIELD

Friedel Dzubas was born in Berlin and studied at the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts, as well as with artist Paul Klee. He came to the United States as a designer in 1939. Associating himself with the New York School of abstract painting in the fifties, Dzubas also brought the European tradition to his work. In the seventies, the work became much more dramatic through his use of surprising color contrasts. Dzubas exhibited regularly in New York and other art centers and his work is well-known as belonging to the Color Field movement.

Dzubas has said, "When you work large, it's easier to get lost, and I want to get lost." He calls paintings such as Grand Mesa "epic procedures," monumental events which maintain both transient interaction and dramatic presence. In Grand Mesa, Dzubas has picked and chosen among the major movements in abstract art to arrive at his own unique combination. The strong impression of movement, the bands of color, and the arrangement of shapes in Grand Mesa recall both the "hot" and "cool" schools of painting. Although the areas of color seem to whiz through space, their colors are subdued, their movement controlled. Grand Mesa is vibrant but not explosive.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Karen Wilkin, Four Decades show, Andre Emmerich, 1990
"Born and raised in Berlin, he recalls being impressed by the work of Munch and Van Gogh, as a student in the early 1930s. (Dzubas fled Germany in 1939, arriving in the U.S. via London and Montreal...There's always the suspicion that for all their unequivocal abstractness, Dzubas' paintings are about momentous events, cosmic forces and personal epiphanies...Sometimes Dzubas seems to marry the lushness of the grand manner to the austerity of modernism, reinventing 17th century narrative in late 20th century abstract terms, substituting floating color masses for gesticulating figures and inflections of surface and hue for chiaroscuro...The pools and swipes of pigment, the complex arrays of subtly varied color, the moody shifts from bright to dark are orchestral, even operatic...Dzubas' themes, too, frequently seem to be those of traditional as much as modernist art. In the 1970s, his canvases were populated by generously sized color patches that jostled one another, jockeying for space...These floating but disciplined color blocks seemed at once portentous, highly charged and relatively intangible. They frayed off at the edges, like clouds, so that for all their considerable dramatic presence and for all the density of their paint against their (often) diaphanous surroundings, they seemed transient and liable to change. Dzubas describes paintings of this type, with their extraordinary complexity of color and reverberant, loaded compositions, as 'epic procedures,' made by 'putting down a series of events with pauses in between.' These are sometimes of monumental proportions, meant to be read sequentially, with each of the elements carrying equal dramatic weight...From the 1950s on, past and present, the romantic and the classic, Apollo and Dionysus have been equally present in his best pictures, and the tension between them gives the paintings much of their impact."

Charles Millard, Hirshhorn Museum, 1983
In all of these pictures, as in most of those of the later seventies, an interest in monumentality continues to evidence Dzubas' response to eighteenth-century decorative painting, particularly as it is to be seen in the churches of southern Germany and Austria. Increasing freedom, one wants to say eccentricity, of composition similarly suggests the mastery the artist has attained.

Interview with Dzubas, 1982 for Hirshhorn show
I've found for myself, that to paint abstract pictures small successfully is more difficult than to paint abstract pictures at a larger, more physically comfortable size..It has much to do with impulse and spontaneity, and the body facilitates the acting-out impulse, so the surface will receive the activity..."

Kenneth Baker, Art in America, 11/83
"In the early 60s Dzubas apparently concluded that his strength lay in the disposition of color rather than in the dramas of gesture, for his painting suddenly became cooler, brighter and simpler. He started smoothing out and tightening up his color areas, leaving traces of gestural energy around their edges....The only "action" in these paintings is the interplay of hue and shape, and the occasional suggestion that a color is traveling within the picture space...He tends to paint broad bands of color that are solid and hard-edged at one end and feathered toward blank canvas at the other. The fading of color, thinning of paint and the leaning or veering quality of the shapes themselves create an impression of movement across the surface...Dzubas's major technical accomplishment is to have found a vocabulary of forms that manifests the activity of painting and can be varied indefinitely...There is little point in debating the caliber of Dzubas's color sense--the decorative felicity of some paintings obviates dispute."