Friedel Dzubas spent most of his career making enormous, vibrant Color Field–esque abstract paintings. But for a brief stint in the early 1960s, he abandoned color altogether. He became so taken with the outcome of that period—a series of soft yet stark black-and-white paintings—that he dreamed of finding a Baroque chapel somewhere in Europe and covering its walls with them.
He never got his chapel. But more than 30 years after his death, the German-born painter has come surprisingly close.
On opening night of “Friedel Dzubas: Darkness into Light” at Nathalie Karg Gallery in Manhattan, Robert Keith, a director at the gallery, walked me through a room filled with the artist’s rarely seen black-and-white paintings. Keith pointed out that the building was once a school belonging to the neighboring Ukrainian church. Dzubas, he said, would have been enormously proud to see his work displayed there. It was something he’d wanted all his life.
“If Dzubas sees us from above, I’m sure he’s very happy,” Karg told me a few days later during a chat on the second floor of the gallery.
The exhibition, organized with Nicolas Graille of the gallery Jules Lazare, revisits one of the strangest and most personal periods in the career of an artist who knew just about everybody in the New York art world but never became quite as famous as many of his friends.
Dzubas was born in Berlin in 1915 to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. He fled Nazi Germany for the United States in 1939 and eventually found himself among the painters who would change American art. He knew Jackson Pollock, shared a studio with Helen Frankenthaler, and became friends with the influential critic Clement Greenberg. He participated in the famous Ninth Street Show in 1951 and had a solo exhibition at Leo Castelli’s gallery in 1958. In other words, he was hardly an outsider. He was there when Abstract Expressionism was becoming the dominant force in American painting.
Yet Dzubas could never outrun the enormous shadow of his better-known contemporaries. Yes, his pictures found their way into major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim, and he had a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., in 1983. But his name doesn’t carry anything like the recognition of Pollock or Frankenthaler.
Why not? Karg thinks the answer may be as simple as changing tastes. “It’s fashion, it’s taste, it’s the generations that change,” she said. Sometimes an artist enjoys enormous success, only to fall out of favor as collectors move on. Sometimes an artist’s moment arrives much later.
Dzubas’s black paintings are a prime example of this phenomenon.
In 1959, after finally becoming an American citizen, the artist returned to Germany for the first time in 20 years. It was an emotionally complicated homecoming. In the late 1930s he escaped a country that was descending into Nazism, leaving his family behind. According to Graille, who has worked closely with the artist’s daughter and estate, surviving letters from Dzubas’s mother suggest she was deeply hurt by his departure and long absence. “You left, you abandoned us,” Graille recalled her writing in one of her letters to Dzubas.
Exactly what happened during that visit is impossible to reconstruct. Dzubas traveled through Germany and Austria, visiting Baroque churches and spending time at a monastery. The trip seems to have awakened his interest in the Catholic traditions of his childhood, along with memories of the country he’d left behind. “He was always, at his core, I think, still a traditional European painter,” Graille said.
Soon afterward, Dzubas began making paintings that looked almost nothing like the colorful abstractions associated with his name.
The bright, expansive shapes had disappeared. In their place came black marks, gray washes, looping lines, and dense arrangements of brushstrokes somewhere between Twombly’s chalk drawings and Pollock’s contained chaos. Some look almost like handwriting, though there’s nothing to read. Others suggest crosses, figures, or religious scenes. Several have borders worked into the composition that hint at the ornate frames associated with Old Master works or religious paintings, giving them the appearance of devotional objects.
The titles offer clues of what Dzubas was thinking: Temptation, Betrayal, Rex, and Walpurgis, the last a reference to a German festival with pagan roots.
The works were shown at Robert Elkon Gallery in 1962, where the critical response was mixed. In the New York Times, Brian O’Doherty wrote that the works appeared gloomy and largely unconvincing. Donald Judd, who back then was a young critic and artist, was more impressed, even if his praise was charmingly restrained. “This one is not bad,” Judd wrote, after dismissing Dzubas’s previous two exhibitions.
The paintings didn’t find much of a market, either. Dzubas soon returned to color, and the black works largely disappeared from view. Karg thinks the timing was unfortunate. By the early ’60s, the art world was falling in love with Pop art. Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were offering collectors bright colors, recognizable images, and a decidedly different mood. Dzubas, meanwhile, was painting pictures that were, as Karg put it, “sinister.” Not exactly what collectors at the time were looking for.
Graille believes these paintings could be the most revealing works Dzubas ever made, bringing together his German upbringing, American career, religious interests, and complicated family history. “To me, this body of work is probably the most overlooked of his whole career, and the most original, most personal work that he made,” he said.
Graille first became involved with Dzubas’s work nearly a decade ago, when he met the artist’s daughter, Hani. He later began working with the estate, which had continued to find buyers for Dzubas’s better-known paintings of the ’60s and ’70s. The black works, however, had received little attention.
When Graille and Karg met through a mutual friend, they realized their interests complemented one another. Karg had been increasingly interested in revisiting historical artists, while Graille was working with estates and establishing his own gallery, Jules Lazare, which he named in tribute to his late mother.
The two remain separate businesses but share some expenses and collaborate on exhibitions. Next month they’ll open a show of work by Larry Poons. For Karg, the partnership provides an opportunity to look beyond the younger artists who dominate so much of the contemporary gallery business.
“There are so many good artists, but they have never been really accounted for,” she said.
And collectors are beginning to pay attention to Dzubas again. According to data from ARTDAI, the artist’s annual auction sales have grown considerably over the past decade, from $468,226 across 14 lots offered in 2016 to more than $1.6 million across 25 lots offered in 2025. In May, his painting Entrance, offered alongside another work, sold at Christie’s for $160,000, against a high estimate of $100,000. (All figures are hammer prices.)
The market hasn’t been entirely immune to the broader slowdown. Dzubas’s sell-through rate has slipped to 81.3 percent so far in 2026, with 3 of 16 lots failing to find buyers.
Still, when I asked Graille about the market, he seemed almost offended by the premise. “The market is great, but who cares?” he said. “Art is about more than sales.” He’s also encouraged by renewed institutional interest. Graille said that German collector Reinhard Ernst, whose museum in Wiesbaden holds a major collection of Frankenthaler’s work, has been assembling what he described as the world’s largest collection of Dzubas paintings. Ernst now owns 12 works from the black series, some of which are on loan to the New York exhibition. The museum is planning a Dzubas retrospective for June 2027.
The New York show has found buyers, too. Karg said several paintings had sold, with others on reserve. Graille described the exhibition as nearly sold out, with particular interest in the larger works. For paintings that struggled to find buyers in 1962, that’s quite a turnaround.
But the more interesting question may be what this renewed attention means for Dzubas’s reputation. His colorful paintings have for years secured his place in the history of postwar American abstraction. The black series suggests there’s another, more complicated story to tell. And that brings the artist back to the church.
In a 1982 interview, Dzubas described becoming obsessed with the possibility of filling a chapel with his black drawings. He imagined them covering the architecture, turning the space into something between an exhibition and a religious experience. He died in 1994, never having realized the project.
Now, in a former church school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, some of those paintings have finally found a home that would have made sense to him. It isn’t the Baroque chapel he imagined, but it’s probably the next best thing.