Penelope Gottlieb’s recent paintings are large-scale, highly detailed, and densely rendered works that explore ecological crisis and botanical extinction. The artist re-envisions, and ultimately re-invents, lost botanical plant life based on historical descriptions and accounts. In the absence of existing visual references for these perished species, Gottlieb engages extinction in a literal way by summoning its subjects back to life through a series of imagined reconstructions. Gottlieb’s work, while charged with timely environmental anxieties, and conversant with our shared dread of ecological peril, is powerfully seductive and visually alluring. Deceivingly decorative and lush upon first glance, the paintings’ aesthetic veneer is anything but superficial. Upon closer inspection, the work reveals an arresting network of imagery, complexity, and depth.