Chloe Wise on the Art of Looking Up

On a sweltering afternoon this past July, I paid a visit to the artist Chloe Wise in her midtown Manhattan studio. “You have great timing,” she says as I step into her light-flooded space, where she also lives. “I literally just took the bread out of the oven.”

This came as no surprise to me, as Wise, 34, is famous not only for her punchy portraits and her oozing sculptures of food, but for her homemade focaccia as well. She picked up baking as a hobby, “like everybody,” in 2020. Later we’ll tuck in to that delicious sourdough, topped, of course, with butter (another Wise subject). But it’s not the food I’m here for.

I’ve come to discuss her latest body of work: a suite of moody paintings of people glancing skyward. She describes them as Caravaggio meets Spielberg—eerie and uncanny and filled with the iconography of both early Christian art and sci-fi films. She’s tapping into a long lineage: “Every civilization has a religious story that has to do with looking up,” she says.

So what are her subjects seeing (or seeking) up there? Angels? Aliens? God? She doesn’t have the answer—the answer’s not really the point. “I’m interested in the mystery. I’m interested in the wonder. I’m interested in the human capacity for belief itself.”

This week those paintings go on view at Almine Rech gallery in Tribeca, in a show titled “Myth Information” (September 18–October 25). It’s Wise’s first solo show in New York with the gallery since 2021’s “Thank You For the Nice Fire,” a presentation that blended cheeky installations with close-crop portraits. If that show captured the anxiety of a world still reeling from the pandemic, this one is more like an escape hatch—a desperate hope that something out there can save us, or, at the very least, distract us for a little while.

This show marks the first time she’s gone all-in on just paintings. No showy sculptures of dripping Caesar salads made out of urethane or winking videos of faux infomercials. Even the number of works in the show was edited down to a reasonable 14. This is Wise, a self-professed maximalist, dialing it back. “I’ve never done anything minimal in my life,” she tells me. “It feels like a mature decision. But it’s also a little vulnerable…. It kind of lets the painting really be the focal point.”