Special Music: Works on Paper

“For nearly twenty years, Robert Szot has been a constant in the fluctuating Brooklyn art scene. The artist, who arrived in New York from Texas as a twenty-five year old and has since felt the pressures of New York’s stage, embodies honesty in his work. Szot does not shy away from beauty or painterly skill, instead pushing lyrical abstraction forward while rejecting the ever-present pull of zombie formalism. His work is hard to pin down, evincing canonical references in his formal techniques and relationship with beauty and music that seem connected with the abstraction of Synchromist artists such as Stanton Macdonald-Wright or Morgan Russell, a movement that predated Abstract Expressionism by 30 years. These references, though, are mediated by the history of color field painting, at times reaching washy paint handling and breaks between colors reminiscent of Helen Frankenthaler. Regardless, the clearest position in Szot’s work is a deadly sentimentality, the kind of pride in the American painting lineage that leaves Szot’s work poetic, vibrant, emotional, and unapologetically divorced from the often-cold embrace of contemporary painting paradigms.”

- Paul Weiner, Critique Collective

Robert Szot (b. 1976) has exhibited his work in many galleries across the United States from New York to Los Angeles and Texas. Szot’s paintings have been exhibited in the Saatchi Gallery in London and, in 2014, the artist was invited to participate in the Whitney Museum Art Party. His work is in public collections, including Credit Suisse, and numerous private collections, such as Beth DeWoody and the Bass Family.