Bagel #5 a bagel-shaped polyurethane bag with a silver chain and Chanel logo, went viral in 2014 when actress and model Bobbi Menuez wore it to attend Karl Lagerfeld’s Grocery Store show at Paris Fashion Week. For hours, photographers, editors and celebrities They mistook it for a new creation of the designer. But the piece was not the work of the kaiser of fashion, but of Chloe Wise, and it was not a bag either, but one of the sculptures in the series Bread bags exhibited that same year and the trompe l’oeil of an intelligent declaration of intent.
He Bagel No. 5 by Chanelalong with the Louis Vuitton baguette or Ain’t No Challah back (pack) girl Prada from the same series, objects so realistic and elegant that they could easily pass for authentic fashion accessories, show that luxury is, after all, a symbolic construction.
Wise has built a work that transitions between painting, sculpture, installation and audiovisual language.
Since then, the world of fashion and creation in general has not stopped paying attention to him: Jacquemus commissioned him for the spring-summer campaign in 2019 and Olivia Rodrigo asked him for the cover of her latest album (2026).
Born in Montreal in 1990 and based in New York, Wise has built a body of work that moves between painting, sculpture, installation and audiovisual language. Fashion girl, she is part of a group of New York artists who are bringing the urban scene to a wider audience through social networks. She has more than 220,000 followers on Instagram, where she is very active posting videos close to performance, doing glamorous, unpleasant or simply fun things.
His work focuses on portraiture. With humor and irony, he winks at the canonical paintings of art history while examining the channels that contribute to the construction of identity, conditioned by images that we consume daily and that, without realizing it, end up defining our way of inhabiting the world.
He laughs at the system from within, his visually attractive, meticulous and even elegant works hide a small crack between the perishable and the enduring, between fiction and reality that forces the viewer to stop. That look reaches a new dimension in Extrasensorythe immersive installation that can be visited within the framework of Art Basel at the H. Geiger Cultural Foundation. The title extrasensory refers to that which escapes immediate perception: religious beliefs, desire or the sighting of UFOs.
The exhibition begins in the foundation’s lobby converted into a store of religious and esoteric gadgets; A second room places the viewer in a kind of large dressing room where they can prepare for the ritual and from there go to the last room where it is projected. Psy-Fywritten and directed by Chloe Wise herself, whose cast brings together some of the most interesting figures on the New York scene. The rapper JT, the actors Lucas Bravo, Delaney Rowe, Ben Ahlers, Michel Buscemi and Bianca Leigh appear. They are joined by artists who also question the construction of identity such as Miles Greenberg, Moses Sumney or Martine Gutiérrez.
At a time when many seem to sense the apocalypse, the artist proposes an exercise in observing the growing phenomenon of beliefs without providing answers because the question is not so much what we have in front of us but what we think we are seeing, and concludes: “I don’t believe, but I believe in believing.”
Source: Lavanguardia
