Artist Penelope Gottlieb addresses challenges within the plant world in her bold, colorful, large paintings.

“Against Forgetting”, on display May 4 – August 12 at the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Joutras Gallery, consists of works from three series:” Extinct Botanicals”,”Vanishing Series”, and “Invasive Series”, each of which is presented different visually and shares an important status botanically.

Gottlieb’s paintings can be large, colorful, and full of motion that captures a sense of urgency. They can also be reflective and faint, with a quality of fading away. Her paintings are a series of botanical recounts of plants gone extinct and documentations of species that are endangered; or they show invasives that are jeopardizing balance in our natural environments.