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, distills 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.

Karen Arm (b. 1962) lives and works in Brooklyn and Shelter Island, NY. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 1985 and her MFA from Columbia University in 1989. She has presented seven solo exhibitions with P·P·O·W since 1999. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Shelter Island Historical Society, Shelter Island, NY; Loong Mah, New York, NY; VSOP Projects, Greenport, NY; Foley Gallery, New York, NY; 56 Henry, New York, NY; Fortnight Institute, New York, NY; the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; and the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH; among others. In 2002, Arm received a New York Foundation for the Arts Award for Painting. From 2012 to 2016, Arm’s works were exhibited in the United States Embassy in Burma as part of the Art in Embassies Program.