{"id":98521,"date":"2026-07-06T22:20:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T22:20:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/98521\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T22:20:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T22:20:22","slug":"in-chloe-wises-extrasensory-basel-show-ufos-meet-scripture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/98521\/","title":{"rendered":"In Chloe Wise\u2019s \u2018Extrasensory\u2019 Basel Show, UFOs Meet Scripture"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first room of Chloe Wise\u2019s \u201cExtrasensory\u201d exhibition in Basel is a gift shop-slash bot\u00e1nica. The walls of the entrance of the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger are powder blue and \u201cbusted on purpose,\u201d Wise told me. She spent hours painting them to look moldy.<\/p>\n

Crucifixes, rosaries, UFO keychains, branded lighters, tarot decks, and alien figurines occupy the same shelf. A menorah sits on top of a Sony monitor. Movie posters tacked up with yellow painter\u2019s tape advertise films that don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

Some of the prayer candles bear the usual figures: Christ, the Virgin Mary, St. Anthony. But most depict the cast of PsyFi, Wise\u2019s 34-minute, three-channel film, her longest video work to date. Among them are actor Steve Buscemi\u2019s brother Michael, JT of the rap group City Girls, and the artist Martine Gutierrez.<\/p>\n

Before you encounter these various actors, musicians, and downtown personalities in the film, two rooms later, you meet them as saints. (Even the artist\u2019s Siamese cats receive the devotional treatment.)<\/p>\n

I caught the Almine Rech\u2013represented artist last month, on her 13th day in Basel.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople walk in like, Where\u2019s the show?\u201d Wise told me inside her souvenir shop, laughing.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Chloe Wise.<\/p>\n

Just out of another interview and undercaffeinated, she was grateful, she told me, to speak with someone from New York. (The Tabi-clad artist, 36, is also based there.) We ventured to the nearest coffee shop, in the hospital across the street.<\/p>\n

Wise is famous in a way most artists aren\u2019t. She has a following outside the art world, she\u2019s made songs with the comedian Eric Wareheim, and recently painted a vinyl cover for pop star Olivia Rodrigo.<\/p>\n

Though I hadn\u2019t met her before, I knew her work through the internet. In 2014, the artist came to attention for her hyperrealistic sculptures of bread bags and butter mounds. In recent years, she\u2019s been better known for her portraits of New York personalities like Julia Fox\u2018s bestie, photographer Richie Shazam. In her glossy oil paintings, Baroque-lit subjects pose among self-help books, sometimes holding food. They have a seductive quality that makes them ripe for virality.<\/p>\n

In her last show at Almine Rech in New York, \u201cMyth Information,\u201d this past fall, the artist began to explore what she calls \u201cthe phenomenon\u201d through painting. Wise\u2019s umbrella for \u201cthe phenomenon,\u201d capital P, is wide: UFOs, angel contact experiences, divinity, telepathy, ghosts, the cosmos, quantum mechanics, and consciousness.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Installation view of \u201cExtrasensory: Chloe Wise\u201d at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger, 2026. 2026 Photo: Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger | KBH.G<\/p>\n

For the past seven years, she\u2019s listened to audiobooks on those subjects while painting in her studio. She finds it absurd that anyone treats the existence of UFOs as a new question. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s a natural place to get to if you\u2019re interested in philosophy or any questions at all,\u201d Wise said in between sips of a coffee slushie as we sat outside the Basel Standort Universit\u00e4tsspital.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cExtrasensory,\u201d her first institutional exhibition in Switzerland, revisits the subject through a different medium: an immersive installation, a book, and that three-channel film.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s myopic to not even wonder,\u201d Wise said of UFOs. \u201cIt\u2019s such a funny cognitive dissonance where, since 2017, when the New York Times did that piece: Wait, so UFOs are real? Everyone\u2019s like, Whoa. It\u2019s like, hello?\u201d<\/p>\n

But her interest in the topic is ultimately aesthetic, not ontological.<\/p>\n

She states this directly at the start of the show\u2019s catalogue. \u201cAt stake here is not whether such phenomena exist,\u201d she said, \u201cbut how they appear, how they enter experience, how they are felt, narrated, domesticated, or disavowed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Three<\/p>\n

Installation view of \u201cExtrasensory: Chloe Wise\u201d at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger, 2026. 2026 Photo: Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger | KBH.G<\/p>\n

Walter Benjamin understood the souvenir to be what remains after an experience has been translated into a commodity. The pilgrim leaves Lourdes with a plastic Virgin. The tourist leaves Paris with an Eiffel Tower keychain. The miracle becomes a tchotchke.<\/p>\n

Past the gift shop is a green room, upholstered and mirrored, somewhere between a UFO that could take off and a dressing room; someone or something could be getting ready to step onto the stage. \u201cThere\u2019s a Lynchian thing happening here,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

And then you\u2019re inside PsyFi, the centerpiece of the exhibition, written and directed by Wise and produced by Gummy Films.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The film runs on a rhythmic loop, cycling and glitching through visual archetypes of divinity, the supernatural, and pop culture. It opens and closes with the night sky, crickets, real UFO footage released by the U.S. government, and YouTube experiencers, an orb dancing low across the frame.<\/p>\n

Kids watch a light in the dark, only to make way for Tiepolo\u2013 and Raphael\u2013style angels (played by actor\/model Bobbi Menuez and singer Moses Sumney) that morph into Victoria\u2019s Secret Angels (artist Martine Syms and actor Sophia Lamar). Cut to Lucas Bravo of Emily in Paris as a red-dreadlocked shaman. Cut to Michael Buscemi\u2019s devil, who looks like an Uncut Gems extra. Cut to an Anne Geddes-style photo shoot featuring an indie-sleaze-coded Miles Greenberg and Instagram comedian Delaney Rowe.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Film still from PsyFi* in \u201cExtrasensory: Chloe Wise\u201d at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger, 2026. Photo: \u00a9 Logan White<\/p>\n

PsyFi\u2018s angels are where Wise\u2019s argument lands. Visual language fails to represent the ineffable; the extrasensory is smoothened. A biblically accurate angel looks more like a UFO than a blonde baby with wings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I asked her what one should look like. \u201cRotating disks, like Ezekiel\u2019s wheel, multiple faces, hundreds of eyes, molten lava, fiery topaz,\u201d she replied.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Bible and religion sanitize and domesticate something that\u2019s actually so wild,\u201d she said. As for what secular capitalist society did to angels: \u201cWe transformed it as a culture into hot women. We make these things more palatable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walking back out through the green room and into the gift shop, I sat with the book. There is film still inside of it of Wise in alien prosthetics, a green fur-collared coat, and a leopard-print pillbox hat. It is hard not to think of Cindy Sherman.<\/p>\n

Both artists star in their own work. Wise kept calling the film a painting, so I asked her about performance instead.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a performative person,\u201d she said. \u201cMy paintings concern themselves with the aesthetics of artifice and performance: the uncanny, eerie feelings that can be both.\u201d Then: \u201cIf the phenomenon itself is a performer\u2014it steps onto the stage as an angel one day, and presents itself as a UFO to a farmer the next\u2014what better way than to give it a stage performance?\u201d Then: \u201cI\u2019m in it, too. I\u2019m acting in it, too. I just can\u2019t help myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

PsyFi, she said later, was a chance to make the most expensive painting she could.<\/p>\n

Sherman\u2019s work is the product of self-conscious debasement. She makes herself grotesque to the point of discomfort. Wise is luminous in every frame.<\/p>\n

\u201cExtrasensory\u201d is on view at KBH.G, Spitalstrasse 18, Basel, Switzerland, through September 6.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first room of Chloe Wise\u2019s \u201cExtrasensory\u201d exhibition in Basel is a gift shop-slash bot\u00e1nica. The walls of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98522,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8],"tags":[35193,27390,77,42498,1152,47437],"class_list":["post-98521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basel","tag-artists","tag-artnet-news","tag-basel","tag-chloe-wise","tag-exhibitions","tag-kulturstiftung-basel-h-geiger"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116875364309398176","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98521\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}