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# New York's Nathalie Karg Gallery shows Friedel Dzubas's black paintings
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/niu-iorkskaia-galereia-nathalie-karg-pokazyvaet-redkie-chiorno-belye-kartiny-fridelia-dzubasa-na-vystavke-fridel-dzubas-iz-tmy-k-svetu/
- Published: 2026-10-27T09:39:51.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-27T09:50:47.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: The Golden Age, Art, New York, People

The Nathalie Karg Gallery in New York is showing rare black-and-white paintings by Friedel Dzubas in the exhibition "Friedel Dzubas: From Darkness to Light".

Dzubas became famous as a master of colour field painting. He was born in Berlin in 1915 to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, and in 1939 he fled Nazi Germany for the United States. In New York he shared a studio with Helen Frankenthaler, befriended the critic Clement Greenberg and in 1951 took part in the famous Ninth Street Show, which presented the New York abstractionists to the public. In 1958 the Leo Castelli Gallery mounted a solo exhibition of his work, and in 1983 the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington showed a retrospective. Dzubas's works are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum, yet he never won the fame of some of his contemporaries.

In 1959 Dzubas visited Germany for the first time in 20 years, by then an American citizen. The journey seems to have reawakened in him an interest in the Catholic traditions of his childhood. Letters from his mother survive, in which she bitterly reproached her son for having left and abandoned his family. After the trip Dzubas painted the black series: grey washes, meandering lines and dense brushstrokes that on some canvases resemble handwriting, while on others one can make out crosses, figures and religious scenes. The artist gave the paintings the titles "Temptation", "Betrayal", "Rex" and "Walpurgis Night".

In 1962 the Robert Elkon Gallery showed these paintings, and the critics received them with reserve. Brian O'Doherty of The New York Times found them gloomy and unconvincing, while the then young critic Donald Judd spoke of one of them as not a bad piece of work. Buyers, too, showed no interest in the series, since in those years the public was in thrall to Pop Art, that is, the art of bright mass imagery of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

Dzubas dreamed of covering the walls of a Baroque chapel in Europe with his black-and-white paintings. The exhibition fulfils his wish in part: the gallery building once housed the school attached to the neighbouring Ukrainian church. Gray has worked with the artist's legacy for almost ten years and considers the black series the most original and personal part of his oeuvre.

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