Nicholas Robinson Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Robert Zungu. The exhibition, entitled Poor Theater, includes sculptures and photographs that examine environmental conservation and the formation of marginalized social communities.

The exhibition's title references Jerzy Grotowski's eponymous Polish theater company that rose to prominence during post-war Europe. In Grotowski's Poor Theater, the stage is reduced to its bare elements, props are made from impoverished materials and the actors rely on the rigorous physicality of their bodies.

Using Grotowski's theories as a point of departure, and through a collaboration with the US Holocaust Museum, Zungu creates a makeshift backdrop of the Podgorze Ghetto as the locus for his exhibition. The image of the gates explores how communities can be sequestered and endangered by social isolation.

The exhibition investigates the ethics of science in relation to cultural and medical advancement. The photograph Untitled (Five Gorillas) depicts five plaster death masks made from a family of Mountain Gorillas. These masks, made by Dr. Carl Ackley in the 1920s, and hunted under the auspices of science, became the foundation for the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. In addition, Zungu's sculpture Untitled (Horseshoe Crabs: Dialytic Grouping) is composed of three horseshoe crabs cast in bronze, each with a white patina to appear as if they were bled dry. Horseshoe crab blood is essential to contemporary medical research and is widely harvested to test the purity of vaccines and intravenous medical equipment.
Each artwork in the exhibition incorporates natural materials; the sculpture Eridanus, for example, is composed of 30 white, North American tiger moths pinned to the gallery wall in the formation of The River constellation. Each moth, signifying the location of a corresponding star, composes an abstract wall drawing. Other works in the exhibition include materials such as cast paper, painted bags of flour, bronze, stalactites, plaster, ebonized wood, and rolled copper.

Poor Theater also addresses issues of environmental conservation. In the photograph Striped Land Snails (X), ten snails are documented on a vintage map of an elevator circuit board. The composition maintains a surreal tone by relating the circles and spirals found in nature with the hand drawn lines of an electrical blueprint. The photograph considers the formation of communities and the consequences of industrialization on the biological world; what was once a forest is now an urban grid.

Zungu (b. 1978) lives and works in New York.

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