Chloe Wise paints girls, knives and desire: who is the artist chosen by Olivia Rodrigo?

For the cover of the special edition of her new album You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, Olivia Rodrigo entrusted her portrait to Canadian artist Chloe Wise. The result is Carve Our Names (2026), a work in which Rodrigo appears in a pink dress, set in an idyllic landscape, holding a knife with the same ease with which she might hold a flower. It is an image that brings together innocence and unease, romance and menace, in a balance that belongs as much to Rodrigo’s narrative universe as to Wise’s practice.

The cover artwork is, in fact, the latest piece in a body of work that Wise has been developing for over a decade: inhabiting consumer society while critiquing it, to the point of making the critique itself as seductive as the world it questions.

It was the Bread Bags that first made this attitude visible: sculptures that transformed baguettes, bagels and loaves of bread into fake Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Prada bags. Absurd and yet perfectly believable objects, elegant enough to pass for real fashion accessories and unlikely enough to reveal how luxury is, first and foremost, a symbolic construction. Wise took the language of trends and turned it inside out with irony, showing how desire moves through a precise code of lettering, logos, objects and images.

Since then, she has been described as a phenomenon, an it girl, a fashion artist, a rising star of international painting and an interpreter of a new Baroque. And, in part, she really is all these things: over the years, Wise has built a magnetic presence, perfectly at ease among openings, fashion shows, galleries and social media, able to take part in intellectual debates and carry the weight of major international exhibitions. If walking the line between pop culture and critique might once have seemed like a risky game, today it is clear that the persona has never overshadowed the work. If anything, it has become an extension of it, amplifying its message and embodying the very way of inhabiting the world that her painting observes, renders and continually calls into question.

But let’s take a step back. Born in Montreal in 1990, Chloe Wise now lives and works in New York. She studied at Concordia University before establishing herself on the international scene with a practice that has always moved effortlessly between painting, sculpture, video and installation. There is an underlying coherence within a body of work defined by ambiguity, and it may be one of its rarest qualities.

People are almost always at the center of her work, especially their behaviors. Friends, collaborators and acquaintances become the starting point for portraits that depict less an individual than an attitude, a character, a human type: the way each person plays a role, stages themselves and adheres to an aesthetic or a belief system.

The subjects are rarely captured in composed or flattering poses. We find them with shiny skin, eyes rolled back, a faint grimace, their bodies suspended between naturalness and artifice. They resemble caricatures of the photos that fill our phone galleries at the end of a night that got a little out of hand. Images we have all seen before, perhaps even taken ourselves. And it is precisely this familiarity that makes them so compelling. Wise’s work has always moved along the fine line between self-representation and caricature, never making it entirely clear where one ends and the other begins. Her early works featured figures in disguise, often as animals, as if they were ready for a masquerade party. Then came the hands clutching food, turning still life into a way to reflect on the body, pleasure and desire. In recent years, the portrait has returned to center stage. The atmosphere has gradually become more theatrical, with artificial lighting, stark chiaroscuro and compositions that draw as much from Baroque painting as from editorial photography. These are suspended stories, in which one never fully understands whether something is actually happening or whether the scene has been staged.

Wise revisits the classical idea of the painting as a window onto the world and cracks it open with a sly smile. What we see, on canvas as on screen, is less a window than a portal to a possible reality: an image that asserts something while immediately casting doubt on it, declaring both its message and its constructed nature.

Carve Our Names is no exception. At first glance, the painting seems to tell a very simple story: a girl in a meadow, a pink dress, a knife. Then you realize that it is precisely the knife that changes everything. Is she carving the name of a lover into the bark of a tree, as the title suggests? Or is she looking into the blade, a moment before committing an act of violence?

The same applies to PsyFi, the most ambitious film project Wise has undertaken to date: a three-channel immersive installation that connects religious apparitions, UFO sightings, non-human intelligences and science-fiction imagery. The work debuts as the centerpiece of Extrasensory, the exhibition curated by Samuel Leuenberger at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger in Basel, running through September 6, 2026, and opening as the art world gathers in the Swiss city for the “fair of fairs.” Around the film, a journey takes shape through esoteric souvenirs, religious relics, extraterrestrial gadgets and environments that evoke, at once, a place of worship, a dressing room and the interior of a spaceship. If, in the early days, it was bread bags that spoke to the wealthy who desired Chanel, today it is extraterrestrials speaking to the art world gathered in Basel. The symbols change, but the same clarity remains in observing the belief systems of those who watch, buy, exhibit and inhabit a world convinced it sits at the center of reality, even when it seems entirely outside it.