Arrested Motion: Friedel Dzubas 1961-1971
November 3, 2011- December 23, 2011
Join us for an opening reception on November 3rd from 6:00- 8:00 PM
Loretta Howard gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Arrested Motion: Friedel Dzubas 1961-1971
Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994) is often identified by his ties to the New York school of Abstract expressionists. He was associated with Jackson Pollock in East Hampton and from 1952 to 1953 shared a studio with Helen Frankenthaler. While his earlier works bear the hallmarks of the New York School by the 1960s the artist had begun to empty and simplify his canvases. The large-scale paintings on view in this exhibition trace the artist’s trajectory from frenetic brushwork to diffuse color.
It was during the 1960s that the artist secured his reputation as a painter of great merit and a mainstay of color field painting. “ In 1964 the artist was included in the seminal exhibition Post Painterly Abstraction curated by Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Karen Wilkin describes the canvasses from this time as “typical of the fresh, lucid color abstraction of those years.” As the artist continued to empty and simplify his picture plane his treatment of movement shifted from one of illustration to suggestion. Instead his luminous canvasses are scattered with exuberant color, free from reference. Determined to “let color speak as directly as possible” the artist began to explore a combination of minimal forms, awash in negative space. By the 1970s these forms appear as if caught in arrested motion, a still frame of dramatic color.