Nouveau

Friedebald (Friedel) Dzubas studied art in his native land before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and settling in New York City. In Manhattan during the early 1950s, he shared a studio with fellow abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler. He began exhibiting his Abstract expressionist style paintings at this time. In the 1960s he became associated with Color field painting and Lyrical Abstraction. He was included in Post-painterly Abstraction a 1964 exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg. Dzubas was a friend of Clement Greenberg, who in turn introduced him to Jackson Pollock and other artists.
Dzubas was a pioneer of the stain painting technique alongside Frankenthaler. His earlier works are gestutral, but he moved towards working exclusively with colorful staining by scrubbing thick layers of color into large, unprimed canvases. The staining process created fields of dense color and other areas where the color seemed almost translucent; for Dzubas, these paintings referenced natural phenomena, emotion, the painterly gesture, and the experience of color itself.