This week in Newly Reviewed, Will Heinrich covers Friedel Dzubas’s energetic squiggles, a group show with a milk crown, and an exhibition heavy on unfiltered self-expression.
Soho
Friedel Dzubas
Through Nov. 7. Nathalie Karg/Jules Lazare, 127 Elizabeth Street; 212-563-7821, nathaliekarg.com.
Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994) mostly painted vivid blocks of color that slide into one another like tectonic plates. But he also produced a small body of work, originally shown at Elkon Gallery in New York in 1962, entirely in black.
Dzubas was born in Germany, to a Jewish father and Catholic mother. In the thorough, informative essay she wrote to accompany this loose reprise of that show, the scholar Rachel Stella points out that his black paintings followed his first trip back there since before World War II. He was also, critically, working at a time when abstract painting still carried, at least in certain circles, tremendous cultural and even philosophical weight.
Unlike his better-known color field paintings, the black works are all about the line: a looping, energetic squiggle that goes back and forth from edge to edge. In a couple of examples, like “Grey Abbey,” Dzubas varies this mark significantly, making shapes that evoke flowers, animals, eyes or his wife’s initials. But in most of the paintings, the marks — tighter by the edges, looser in the middle, adorned with drips and dots — seem intended only to fill space.
Painting shadows and darkness would be an understandable response to a world-historical catastrophe. But it’s this attempt to fill space for its own sake that really reflects the 20th century’s crises of morality and identity. You can see Dzubas acting out the hope that a series of frenetic, more or less arbitrary movements will be meaningful if given the proper framing. WILL HEINRICH
