Robert Szot: Dust Do Shine

Anita Rogers Gallery is pleased to present Dust Do Shine, a solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Robert Szot. The exhibition, Szot’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, will be on view September 23 through October 31 at 494 Greenwich Street, Ground Floor, in New York City. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist on Wednesday, September 23, from 6–8pm.

Dust Do Shine marks a significant development in Szot’s practice. While his work has long been characterized by complexity, movement, and layers of visual information, the new paintings introduce larger forms, greater restraint, and more defined spatial structures. Together, the works balance intensity with quiet, and bold color with areas of openness and reflection.

Across the exhibition, Szot builds his surfaces through layers of color, metal leaf, drawing, and repeated revision. Large fields of color are interrupted by fragments of charcoal and drawing, buried passages of color, scraped paint, and weathered edges. Rather than beginning with a fixed image, Szot develops each work through a process of adding, obscuring, removing, and revisiting elements of the composition.

The visual focus of the show is the dialogue between three 74-inch-high paintings: High Looks, Arcadia, and August Complex. Together, the works demonstrate the range of Szot’s approach in this new body of work. High Looks is marked by electric chromatic density, while Arcadia, the largest work in the show, measuring over 8ft wide, introduces an expansive, gold-toned surface. August Complex brings a more concentrated arrangement of color and form. Though distinct in character, the three paintings share the scale, structure, and material experimentation that define the exhibition.

This relationship to materiality remains central to Szot’s practice. The exhibition brings together works made with oil, metal leaf, and charcoal. In works such as Arcadia and Wonders Greatly Reduced, reflective surfaces are not decorative effects, but sites of pressure, interruption, and light. The works on paper extend this language at a more intimate scale, offering concentrated encounters with the same concerns: buried structure, damaged color, and the tension between immediacy and restraint.

In Dust Do Shine, surfaces are not polished into resolution. Szot allows the history of each work to remain visible. Layers are built up, altered, and partially revealed, creating surfaces that shift between density and openness, color and abrasion, reflection and shadow. They become luminous through pressure, time, and repeated acts of looking.