Chloe Wise Turns Basel Into a Souvenir Shop for the Supernatural
At the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger in Basel, Chloe Wise’s first institutional exhibition in Switzerland turns the language of devotion, commerce, and pop culture into a single staged environment. Titled “Extrasensory,” the show begins with a room that looks like a gift shop crossed with a botánica: weathered walls, shelves crowded with crucifixes, rosaries, UFO keychains, branded lighters, tarot decks, and alien figurines, and a menorah perched on top of a Sony monitor. The effect is deliberately unstable, as if belief has been translated into merchandise and then arranged for inspection.
The centerpiece is “PsyFi,” a 34-minute, three-channel film and Wise’s longest video work to date. In it, figures drawn from music, art, and downtown New York culture appear first as ordinary people and then, in a later sequence, as saints. The cast includes Michael Buscemi, JT of City Girls, and Martine Gutierrez, while even Wise’s Siamese cats receive devotional treatment. The film extends the artist’s long-running interest in how images acquire authority, and how charisma, celebrity, and reverence can begin to resemble one another.
Wise, who is represented by Almine Rech, has built a following that reaches well beyond the art world. She first drew attention in 2014 for hyperrealistic sculptures of bread bags and butter mounds, and in recent years has become known for glossy oil paintings of New York personalities, including Richie Shazam. Her work often places Baroque-lit figures among self-help books, food, and other markers of contemporary aspiration, giving the images a seductive surface that has also made them unusually shareable online.
“Extrasensory” expands that visual language into installation, film, and a book. It follows “Myth Information,” Wise’s recent show at Almine Rech in New York, where she began to push more directly into what she calls “the phenomenon” — UFOs, angel contact experiences, divinity, telepathy, ghosts, the cosmos, quantum mechanics, and consciousness. For Wise, the question is not whether such things are real. It is how they are represented, felt, narrated, and absorbed into everyday life.
That distinction gives the exhibition its tension. Wise is not making a case for belief so much as examining the forms belief takes once it enters culture: souvenir, image, performance, and story. In Basel, the result is a room where the sacred and the synthetic sit side by side, and where wonder is treated less as a revelation than as a visual system with its own codes, habits, and afterlife.
