YANNY PETTERS at Botanical Art exhibition in London

Yanny Petters is delighted and honoured to have a work included in the forthcoming exhibition at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London. The Art of Plant Evolution. 22 August 2009 to 2 January 2010. Art meets science in an exhibition of botanical paintings from the Shirley Sherwood Collection, arranged in the latest evolutionary sequence, determined by recent DNA analysis. Not only is botanical art undergoing a renaissance today but recent genetic discoveries have changed the nomenclature and evolutionary sequence of many plants during the last ten years. Each species chosen will be illustrated with a painting selected from over 700 contemporary works in the Shirley Sherwood Collection. The paintings will display a sampling of the plant world from fungi to daisies, including algae, mosses, ferns, conifers and flowering plants. The 136 paintings by 84 artists will cover 50 orders of plants in 118 families for a total of 133 species, providing a sweeping overview of the evolution of plants on earth. It will be an up-to-date celebration for Charles Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of the Species. He would have been the first to appreciate the beauty of contemporary botanical art and to be intrigued by the latest evolutionary sequence in the plant kingdom. The Art of Plant Evolution, a book by Dr Shirley Sherwood and Professor John Kress of the Smithsonian will accompany the exhibition, produced by Kew Publishing.