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 12. 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.”
Even if Wise doesn’t know what exactly is going on in her paintings, for years she’s been deep in research of what could be “up there.” She rattles off the many ways artists have rendered such upward-focused scenes for centuries, starting with the religious variety: “paintings of angel-contact experiences” or “a saint looking up at the sky” or “the clouds parting in some sort of revelation.” Think St. Francis of Assisi with his eyes rolled back and his hands outstretched, palms ready to receive. “Fast-forward to today, and it’s the UFO phenomenon, it’s the orbs, it’s the drones, it’s abduction stories.”
Wise sees these as connected threads. She’s been in conversation with Diana Walsh Pasulka, a writer and professor of religious studies whose 2019 book American Cosmic took a scholarly look at UFOs. “She would say that in the early [religious] texts, that same story where somebody is being contacted by an angel, the way they described the angel wasn’t, like, a blond, blue-eyed, winged, cherubic presence. It was actually like rotating discs of fiery, golden topaz,” Wise explains, her eyes widening. “Like, sorry, that’s giving UFO!
“I’m not trying to say that angels are aliens,” she continues, realizing this could get into kooky territory. “My tin hat is on, but that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying, Look at the way that stories get told. It’s through painting, it’s through movies, it’s through stories.”
And indeed, these are her most cinematic paintings yet, like stills from a 1980s horror film where something goes terribly wrong at the prom—though the silk gloves, clingy tights, and ruffled blouses and dresses her subjects wear could easily belong to some angelic Victorian scene. The ambiguity is intentional, meant to get at the very human and era-agnostic feeling of awe.
It’s not just the outfits or the looks on the subjects’ faces that set the tone. It’s the color palette—taken from the VHS covers of films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Contact and the paintings of Old Masters. On the day I visited the studio, she was trying to figure out the hue for a pair of tights in Some abysmal jam. Next to the unfinished canvas she’d taped up a handful of printouts of El Greco paintings. “I was thinking that those colors, they feel sci-fi to me,” she says. Part of it is the contrast—the darkened blues and blacks with pops of jewel tones that feature heavily in these paintings. She went with ruby-slipper red.
Wise has been part of a certain cool-girl downtown milieu for over a decade, popping up at fashion and art-world parties and traveling the world with well-heeled friends (many of whom, like Hari Nef and Richie Shazam, she’s painted over the years). She arrived in New York City in 2013 after getting her BFA at Concordia University in Montreal, where she grew up. She started showing work right out of the gate, and the art she was making back then—winking sculptures of pancakes covered in resin-y syrup, a pool of spilled almond milk atop a plinth, and that infamous Chanel bagel bag—was well-suited to going viral. Suddenly she was everywhere, making art, having fun, playing by her own rules.
“I think a lot of the contemporary art world is relegated to, you have to go to a [certain] school and read Artforum and be super well-connected in order to get something. But I think a lot of my early work sort of transcended that because it was accessible to people, because it was touching on a visual joke language while also being part of the contemporary art conversation,” Wise tells me.
Her style has changed through the years, and though she maintains her wry sense of humor (tinfoil hat and all!), she’s moved away from the flatter, more airbrush-y quality of the paintings she made in the late 2010s for a style that’s richer, grittier, brushier. There’s more drama. In the paintings for “Myth Information,” you see it in the delicately rendered lashes, the glimmers of light in the eyes, the sumptuous folds of the garments.
I asked her how much, if any, thought she’s given to this evolution of style. “I think on one hand there’s the natural thing of you get older, you get more fluent in a language, you have more hours of practice…and painting is one of those things you’ll never, ever finish learning,” she says. “I hope for the rest of my whole life that every few years it does look more something, whether it’s more mature, more held back, at least different in some way that would indicate that there’s growth.”
Growth is what’s given her permission to do this all-paintings show now, to trust that she doesn’t have to distract from their message with a joke or a gimmick. How fitting for a show that’s all about wonder. It’s a feeling to sit with, a puff of smoke you try to catch before it floats away.
“Chloe Wise: Myth Information” is on view at Almine Rech in Tribeca from September 18 to October 25, 2025.