Exotic Invaders

Taylor Evans
Director
tevans@gpgallery.com

Gerald Peters Contemporary is pleased to present Exotic Invaders, a new exhibition of works by interdisciplinary artist Penelope Gottlieb.

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.

Penelope Gottlieb (b.1952) is an Emmy-award winning Motion Picture Title Designer and fine artist. After receiving her BFA from the Art Center College for Design in Pasadena, California, Penelope Gottlieb went on to earn her MFA from the University of California in Santa Barbara where she currently lives and works. Penelope Gottlieb is a painter who has uprooted the tradition of flower painting formally and thematically. In her Invasive Plants series, Gottlieb appropriates and significantly alters existing digital prints from the John James Audubon archive. Gottlieb depicts the ravages of a contemporary ecological phenomenon wherein non-native species are introduced and overtake the balance of its delicate ecosystem.

In these paintings, I reconsider the iconic 19th century imagery by girdling the Audubon birds with tightly woven bands of invasive plant species. The images stage an invasion of this historical imagery, enacting the ravages of a contemporary ecological phenomenon wherein non-native species are introduced into an environment and overtake the balance of its delicate ecosystem. By problematizing the renowned ornithologist’s idyllic representations of natural history, I present a revisionist vision of nature in its current state of compromise and literal bondage.

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