P·P·O·W is pleased to present Night Birds, Karen Arm’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. For over three decades, Arm’s work has engaged dialogues between micro and macro, form and element, and light and space to heighten the intangible aspects of nature while capturing unseeable moments in time. Drawing inspiration from the natural world, Arm investigates her subjects through direct observation, photographs, and other visual tools to uncover their fundamental energetic power. Through an obsessive virtuosity and a meticulous process of layering and glazing, Arm’s canvases function as portals to the infinite sublime.
A culmination of works made over the past six years, Night Birds continues the artist’s exploration of the earthly and celestial and captures our daily metaphysical experience of nature often overlooked by the naked eye. In dense accumulations of waves, rays, dots, and lines, Arm’s meditative compositions seem to push and pull against their own visual gravity. Light and mass engage in the form of beams colliding into a tidal horizon or radiating behind an eclipsed moon. Noting that birds use planetary cues, like the moon and stars, to navigate their long journeys, works such as Untitled (Night Birds), 2025, distill an imagined seascape to its essential interconnected elements. The rays of the sun or moon, the waves of the ocean, and the coordinated flight of birds are bound together in an energetic rhythm that connects the viewer to the spirit of our earth’s origins.
