Chloe Wise
In conversation with Francesca Gavin and JJ Charlesworth
Chloe Wise prefers a neutral brilliance, one that seems to have no harshness, but gradually reveals the fakery and filters that are imposed on our vision and deceive it. By tearing away these artificial alterations, the painting removes the Band-Aids of our beliefs. Pressing where it hurts, it questions the scope of its sacred, bodily act, and the chaotic world around us, whose calls to order we constantly try to evade.
— Boris Bergmann
On the occasion of Chloe Wise's solo exhibition 'Torn Clean', Almine Rech Brussels organized a talk between Francesca Gavin, artistic director of Viennacontemporary, and Chloe Wise. The conversation was moderated by JJ Charlesworth, art critic and editor at ArtReview.
The talk was organized in collaboration with Art Review.
Chloe Wise’s practice spans diverse media, including painting, sculpture, video and installation.
Foregrounding an interest in the history of portraiture, Wise examines the multiple channels that lead to the construction of a Self, paying particular attention to the interweaving of consumption and image making. With a wry sense of humour, she nods to canonical tableaux, like Manet’s Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe, exploring the shared projected desires built around food and the female body. Meticulously hand painted casts of food serve as the base for the artist’s sculptural practice where strange assemblies, now frozen in sculpted plastic, toy with the presence and absence of unchangeability and perishability, fiction and reality. Advertising, fashion, taboo, multi-national brands—Wise looks to the consumptive habits built around these structures with parody and derision, underlying how the body is framed and becomes excessive in its manipulation of these sites.
