Poonam Khanna’s Just Around the Corner

Six inches square, priced at $125 and already sold, Just Around the Corner is a pocket-sized entry in Poonam Khanna’s long study of rain seen through glass.

Just Around the Corner measures six inches by six. Poonam Khanna painted it in acrylic on canvas, mounted the canvas on wood and dated it 2026, and it was offered through PxP Contemporary’s online gallery at $125, where the listing now reads sold out. By any measure it is a small object, the kind of painting that fits on a bookshelf or in the narrow strip of wall between two windows. It also carries the full logic of a practice the Toronto painter has spent close to a decade building, one rainy afternoon at a time.

Khanna paints the city in the rain, and almost always through glass. The gallery files Just Around the Corner among her rainy cityscapes, and its title, with its sense of something approaching but not yet in view, sits easily beside the names she has given her other recent small panels: Into the Unknown, Heading Out, Shelter in Motion.

Signal. What happened: PxP Contemporary offered and sold Poonam Khanna’s Just Around the Corner, one of several small 2026 panels by the Toronto artist listed at the same price. Exact object: Just Around the Corner, 2026, acrylic on canvas mounted on wood, 6 x 6 inches, listed at $125. When and where: offered in PxP Contemporary’s online Poonam Khanna collection and marked sold out at the time of writing. Source: PxP Contemporary’s own product listing and artist page. Why it matters: it shows how an emerging Canadian painter reaches collectors through a US-based online gallery, at the moment a new 50 percent US tariff on Canadian original paintings has come into force.

stir

Khanna’s method starts outdoors, in bad weather. When it rains, she goes out with a camera and photo drivers, cyclists and pedestrians moving through the city, usually from behind a pane of glass: a car windshield, the wall of a bus shelter, or a loose piece of glass taken from an old picture frame that she carries with her and calls her portable window. Those photo become the starting point for paintings built on vibrant hue grounds and soft edges.

The glass does more than frame the view. In her own account of the work, rain blurs the lines between objects until things begin melting into one another, reflections on the pane become part of the landscape, and individual raindrops sometimes hold miniature landscapes of their own. Headlights and streetlights, which might read as background in a conventional street scene, move to the centre: glowing on wet pavement, refracted through droplets, turning a grey day into a field of light. Rainy days may be grey, as her gallery statement puts it, but they are also full of light.

The approach has an origin story. Speaking with digital curator Juna Jung for a 2025 artist feature on Jung’s Substack, Khanna traced a decisive moment to a rainy day when she happened to take the bus instead of the subway, and the photographs she shot at the bus stop that day became a turning point for the work. Jung, who first encountered the work on a sunny day, recognised Toronto in it straight away, picking out downtown buildings and streetcars behind the droplets and blurred figures. Khanna also described painting raindrops as a kind of shh, in which all other worries fall away and “it feels like only me and the raindrops are left.”

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Poonam Khanna Art (@khanna_p)

flow

Her statement does not treat rain as purely atmospheric. In the version published by the Riverdale Hub, the east Toronto gallery and social enterprise, operated by Riverdale Immigrant Women Enterprises, that has shown and sold her work, Khanna sets her paintings against the planet’s water cycle. Most of the earth’s water, she notes, is undrinkable salt water; freshwater from rain and snow sustains forests, rivers and life on land; and rising temperatures are intensifying that cycle, bringing more frequent and intense storms to places including Canada, where average annual precipitation has increased.

Within that frame, the familiar elements of her street scenes take on a double charge. Headlights, she writes, stand for the pull of modern convenience, yet oncoming headlights also carry a sense of approaching danger even as they dazzle. Her painting The Rose Emporium places a lone pedestrian walking home at night beside a flower shop, nature contained and clipped, while a car approaches from behind. In Pedalling Through the Storm, a determined cyclist pushes through busy traffic as the rain dissolves the edges of everything around him.

Jung’s feature draws out a related thread. Khanna told her she wanted to show a certain determination in people who keep walking through a downpour, and to capture the transience of life in the way raindrops erase boundaries and let objects melt into each other. Viewers, she added, often describe the paintings as warm and cosy, like watching the rain from indoors with a coffee or tea in hand, and say the familiar scenes bring back memories.

A title like Just Around the Corner sits naturally in that tension between the comfort of the vantage point and whatever is coming beyond the glass.

scope

Khanna, who is Canadian and was born in 1969, came to painting by chance. She discovered it at a paint night event roughly ten years ago, according to her 2026 biography, and has since turned it into an almost daily practice.

She began exhibiting in 2021 and has appeared in more than 50 group shows, from the Riverdale ArtWalk to the Square Foot Show and the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, where she took booth 95 at Nathan Phillips Square in both 2025 and 2026. In 2023 she was juried into the Federation of Canadian Artists as an elected member, the same year she held her first solo show. In 2024 she was named second runner-up in the Arts to Hearts Emerging Woman Artist of the Year Fall Artprize. In 2025 her painting Out for Delivery 2 earned an honourable mention in the Federation’s Scenes from Canada exhibition, and she was juried into the Society of Canadian Artists. Her work has also appeared in Create and Art Seen magazines.

The Federation’s gallery in Vancouver still lists a spread of her work, from Gliding Along, a 10 by 10 inch acrylic from 2022 that the gallery catalogues as a duck on water, priced at C$275, to larger street scenes such as Red Light Reflections 2, a 36 inch square canvas at C$1,870. The duck painting is a reminder that her subjects have not always been urban. Her biography also lists selections for shows organized by several Toronto galleries and arts associations alongside the fairs, and in spring 2025 she was scheduled to show in the Federation’s Landscapes 2025 exhibition at its gallery.

Her rise has been built largely in public, at outdoor fairs and community venues rather than through a single commercial gallery. Jung’s profile notes that Khanna enjoys meeting artists and collectors at art classes and outdoor fairs and listening to their feedback, and it documents a solo presentation at the Riverdale Hub on Gerrard Street East.

extend

The six-inch format is not a one-off. PxP’s current Poonam Khanna collection lists twelve paintings, with prices running up to $1,475. Six of them, Just Around the Corner included, sit at the same $125 price point, alongside Rider on the Storm 2, Stormy Weather 5, Into the Unknown, Shelter in Motion and Heading Out. Into the Unknown shares its exact specification: six by six inches, acrylic on canvas mounted on wood, 2026. Just Around the Corner and Heading Out are the two marked sold out.

Numbered titles run through the wider collection too, from Neon Lights 5 to Electric Anticipation 3 and Traffic Cone Kaleidoscope 2. That habit of returning to a motif across several canvases matches what Khanna told Jung about her process: she works on several pieces at the same time, partly as a way past the fear of ruining a single painting halfway through.

The titles across her Riverdale Hub listings map the territory: Rear Window Kaleidoscope, Through the Tunnel, Bokeh Dance, Left Turn 2, Rain-Streaked Highway, even a Rainy Day in London 3, a sign that the rain travels with her. Many carry numbers, marking them as one entry in a longer run.

The small panels also mark the entry point to her market. At $125, Just Around the Corner sits at the very bottom of a range that stretches past $3,000 for larger canvases listed through the Riverdale Hub. The support is consistent across much of the catalogue, with acrylic on canvas mounted on wood or cradled panel appearing again and again in her Federation and PxP listings.\

fin

PxP Contemporary describes itself as an award-winning online gallery focused on work under $10,000 by emerging artists, with pop-up exhibitions and art fair appearances across the US through the year. It was co-founded by Alicia Puig and Ekaterina Popova, who also founded the international art publication Create! Magazine, and it is now run by Puig, who serves as Create!’s director. Khanna’s own biography lists Create among the magazines that have featured her work. The gallery says a portion of the proceeds from every sale goes to charitable causes, which since 2022 have centred on The Jed Foundation and the Costa Rican dog rescue Territorio de Zaguates, and it is a member of POWarts, the Professional Organization for Women in the Arts.

Then there is the border. PxP’s listings for Khanna’s small panels carry a note that each painting ships from Canada and that buyers sending it to the US will be billed separately for a 50 percent tariff on original painting. The note reflects a measure that took effect in August 2026, when the United States applied additional 50 percent tariffs to a list of Canadian goods that, as CARFAC’s tariff guidance for artists sets out, includes paintings, drawings, pastels, collages and original prints. Under the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, Canadian culture goods had generally crossed into the US tariff-free, and CARFAC notes that two-thirds of Canada’s culture exports go to the United States. Canadian visual arts organizations, CARFAC among them, have asked the federal government to pursue an exemption for original artworks.

On a $125 panel, a 50 percent duty on the listed price comes to $62.50. Just Around the Corner is marked sold out; the listing does not say whether its buyer was in Canada or across the border.