Friedel Dzubas's Black Paintings Get Their Church, Six Decades On

More than 30 years after Friedel Dzubas died, his rarely seen black-and-white paintings have gone on view in a former church school on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The exhibition, "Friedel Dzubas: Darkness into Light," runs at Nathalie Karg Gallery and was organized with Nicolas Graille of the gallery Jules Lazare.

On opening night, gallery director Robert Keith walked visitors through a room of the black paintings. He pointed out that the building once served as a school for the neighboring Ukrainian church. Dzubas, Keith said, would have been enormously proud to see his work displayed there.

"If Dzubas sees us from above, I'm sure he's very happy," Nathalie Karg said a few days later, speaking on the gallery's second floor.

Who was Friedel Dzubas?

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. He knew Jackson Pollock, shared a studio with Helen Frankenthaler and befriended the critic Clement Greenberg. He took part in the Ninth Street Show in 1951 and had a solo exhibition at Leo Castelli's gallery in 1958. His work entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., gave him a retrospective in 1983.

Yet his name never carried the recognition of Pollock or Frankenthaler. Karg attributed the gap to taste. "It's fashion, it's taste, it's the generations that change," she said.

What set the black paintings in motion?

In 1959, after becoming an American citizen, Dzubas returned to Germany for the first time in 20 years. He traveled through Germany and Austria, visiting Baroque churches and spending time at a monastery. Surviving letters from his mother suggest she felt wounded by his departure. "You left, you abandoned us," Graille recalled her writing.

The trip appears to have reawakened Dzubas's Catholic childhood. "He was always, at his core, I think, still a traditional European painter," Graille said.

The resulting paintings abandoned color entirely. Black marks, gray washes, looping lines and dense brushstrokes sit somewhere between Twombly's chalk drawings and Pollock's contained chaos. Some works resemble unreadable handwriting. Others suggest crosses, figures or religious scenes. Titles such as Temptation, Betrayal, Rex and Walpurgis point toward their frame of mind. Several carry borders worked into the composition, giving them the look of devotional objects.

Robert Elkon Gallery showed the series in 1962. The response was mixed. Brian O'Doherty wrote in the New York Times that the works appeared gloomy and largely unconvincing. The young critic Donald Judd was more impressed: "This one is not bad," he wrote, after dismissing Dzubas's previous two exhibitions.

The paintings found little market. By the early 1960s, Pop art dominated collector attention, and Dzubas, as Karg put it, was painting pictures that were "sinister." He returned to color, and the black works largely vanished from view.

What does the revival change for the artist's standing?

Graille, who began working with Dzubas's daughter Hani and the estate nearly a decade ago, calls the series the artist's most personal. "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.

The market has noticed. According to ARTDAI data, Dzubas's annual auction sales grew from $468,226 across 14 lots in 2016 to more than $1.6 million across 25 lots 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 at hammer. The sell-through rate has slipped to 81.3 percent in 2026 so far, with 3 of 16 lots unsold.

Asked about the market, Graille brushed the question aside. "The market is great, but who cares?" he said. "Art is about more than sales."

Institutional interest is growing. German collector Reinhard Ernst, whose Wiesbaden museum holds a major Frankenthaler collection, owns 12 works from the black series, some on loan to the New York show. The museum plans a Dzubas retrospective for June 2027. Karg and Graille, who operate separate businesses but share expenses, will open a Larry Poons exhibition next month.

Several paintings in the current show have sold, and Graille described the exhibition as nearly sold out, with the strongest interest in larger works. In a 1982 interview, Dzubas described his obsession with filling a Baroque chapel with the black drawings. He died in 1994 without realizing it. The Reinhard Ernst Museum's 2027 retrospective may now offer the fullest account yet of the darker, more personal chapter his colorful reputation has long overshadowed.