While the threat of eminent war caused Friedel Dzubas to emigrate from Germany in 1939 it was in his native land that he first studied painting at the Prussian Academy of Fine Art and in Dusseldorf under Paul Klee from 1936-1939. Dzubas then fled to London before his final destination of the United States. A meeting with Clement Greenberg led Dzubas to other artists like Jackson Pollock, Katherine Dreier, and Helen Frankenthaler.
In 1948 he became a member of the Eight Street Club, an Abstract Expressionist group, which included Willem de Kooning and Franz Kine. In 1952 Dzubas shared studio space with Frankenthaler, the same year he was to have his first one-man exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. In the following decade Dzubas began to experiment with color-field and in 1968 began to utilize an extreme horizontal format in which canvases as long as 20 feet were only several inches high.
In 1969, after receiving several prestigious awards, like two Guggenheim Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Painting Fellowship, Dzubas moved to Ithaca where he would teach at Cornell University until 1974. As his work continued to be represented in exhibitions around the country, like at Knoedler Contemporary Art, Dzubas moved to Boston in 1976 and until 1993 taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. On December 10, 1994 Friedel Dzubas passed away in Auburndale, Massachusetts.