Born in Berlin in 1915 Friedel Dzubas fl Nazi Germany in 1939 and settl in of the present day York in the late 1940 joining a coterie of leading young painters that included Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler (with whom he shared a studio).

Born in Berlin in 1915 Friedel Dzubas fl Nazi Germany in 1939 and settl in of the present day York in the late 1940 joining a coterie of leading young painters that included Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler (with whom he shared a studio). He not at all achieved the prominence of those contemporaries if it were not that continued to develop his radiant abstractions well into the 1980 (he died in 1994) This exhibition consisted of seven large abstract oils from the years 1958-59

chiefly working on unprimed canvas, Dzubas applied wide, thick misfortunes of paint over areas glazed in thin washes, forging a figure/ground relationship in which pictorially emphatic components seem to be suspended before or above a clouded depth. While largely nonrepresentational, level when bearing titles with which their compositions might be identified, the paintings strike one as being full of natural forces like wind and water, and to be conducted by the pull of gravity. Although the judgment winds its way through the unclose depths of an abstract, nearly 10-foot-wide untitled work of 1959 (Dzubas worked large--one of his paintings is 24 feet wide), a broad melancholy strip along the canvas's bottom cutting side suggests a ground supporting three dominant figures that coalesce disclosed of yellow, red and virid brushstrokes. Here, and in principally of his other works of this jiffy Dzubas gives a saliency to the canvas's lower rim as if to suggest earth or sea, an upright orientation and an environment for his otherwise abstract forms.

In Cyclop (1959) a vertical canvas nearly 8 feet high, a lower section washed and scumbl in earthy pigments is topped by means of a configuration of wide white visitations circling a blue-black core. Above is a horizontal vermilion patch, suggesting an Adolph Gottlieb or Mark Rothko painting with discrete shapes floating above single another on an open field. on the other hand because of the title, the r registers as posterity and the imagery suggests an enormous sight standing on spindly legs, grim as its pictorial antecedent, The Cyclop of Odilon Redon. In White Whale (1958) a work that rouses a moody German Romantic sea painting, large verdant and blue masses intimating a whale appear to float within a nebulous space of drifting vegetal life. Thin brown washes below imply a seabed and goldens and roses above read as light from the ocean's surface.

Other works are to a great degree easier in tone and carry with them echoe of different traditions. Bird of Paradise (1958) flaunts a torrent of ruffl ghastly green and orange brushstrokes, suggesting the stately flowers of the title or perhaps an extravagant avian display. It is a dazzling work that owes a great deal of to both the Nabis and Matisse.

--Jonathan Gilmore

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