Women's Lifestyle June 3, 2026 0 Comments

What’s Chloe Wise Planning to Do With That Knife? Inside the Shocking Art Behind Olivia Rodrigo’s Album Cover.

Olivia Rodrigo’s latest album rollout isn’t just music—it’s a full-on cultural spectacle that’s chopping up art history and film flair like a master chef with a switchblade. You see her pirouetting through Versailles in the “drop dead” video, echoing Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette vibes, and then nursing heartbreaks with a nod to Frida Kahlo’s raw emotional canvas in “the cure.” But here’s the kicker—Olivia’s new limited edition vinyl cover features a riveting oil painting by New York’s own Chloe Wise, showcasing the pop star with an intense glare and a knife in hand. It’s almost like Olivia’s daring us to wonder—what’s next? Will she carve out a new chapter or cut through the noise? This isn’t just an album; it’s a bold blend of music, art, and mystery, wrapped in pink babydoll dreams and a sun-dappled suspense. Ready to dive deeper into this electric crossover of sound and stroke? LEARN MORE

3 min read

The rollout for Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love is fully underway, and it’s become obvious she’s tapping into art and film history for inspiration this time around. On “drop dead,” her first single, Rodrigo dances around Versailles, like a latter-day addition to Sofia Coppola’s cult classic, pink-coated film Marie Antoinette; and in “the cure,” her follow-up single, Rodrigo is a nurse attempting to find, well, a cure, for broken withering hearts with a scene that nods to Frida Kahlo’s painting Henry Ford Hospital (1932).

Now, she’s announced the release of a limited edition vinyl featuring a painting by New York–based artist Chloe Wise. The lush oil painting, titled Carve our names (2026), depicts Rodrigo glaring intently at an open switchblade, sunlight piercing through a tree canopy, while wearing one of her iconic pink “babydoll” dresses. Her portrait of Rodrigo is brimming with emotional intensity, with the focus placed squarely on the knife in her hand; which, as Wise aptly sums up, has us all thinking, “What is she about to do with that damn knife?”

Person smiling and holding a painted vinyl record with a portrait of a woman holding a knife.

Chloe Wise

Chloe Wise with the exclusive you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love vinyl cover

The painter first stepped into the scene just over 10 years ago for her satirical art pieces, notably her bread bags (Google Bagel No. 5). Her paintings also prodded the art world, taking a voyeuristic look at art history, rehashing the classics like Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Perhaps Wise’s most recognizable style is evident in her delicately painted, lavish, sometimes eerie, portraits of women, often inspired by her friends or broader social circle. But, recently, Wise turned her attention to film and installation works, preparing for a museum show, “Extrasensory” at Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger. The call from Rodrigo’s team came after she had already packed up her painting gear, but Wise, despite not being in “painting mode,” decided to return to the canvas. What compelled Wise to shift back to her roots for Carve our names was her sense of kinship with Rodrigo’s ability to “play with genre,” something Wise often does. “It was nice to return to and revel in that, while I’m also creating this other body of work that’s so the opposite,” she says.

Person painting on a large canvas in a gallery.

Chloe Wise

Chloe Wise painting Carve our names

“A lot of her visual world lives in this really fun, free, but irreverent femininity that I think really meshes with a lot of the work I was making for the last ten years,” Wise told me, taking a 10-minute break from installing her new show in Basel, which features a three-channel video and two rooms of immersive installations, and centers on ideas of religion and UFO lore.

“When I saw the imagery that she was using for this album and what she asked me to do I was instantly like, ‘That feels like my work. That feels like paintings I’ve made’,” she adds. “And she’s the kind of girl you want to support.”

Carve our names is the only painting Wise made over the last six months, working on it in secret at a friend’s studio. This allowed the artist to take a reflective approach to the painting, revisiting some of the aesthetics and ideas she’s refined over the last decade. Wise typically stages her portraits, meticulously lighting and dressing her subjects. You might mistake the image of Rodrigo as one of Wise’s haunting, almost devious portraits as one of these, but it worked out that the image, photographed by Chad Moore, fit with her practice (Whoever came up with this collaboration, Bravo!).

Zach Hilty/BFA.com

Olivia Rodrigo and Chloe Wise at a Met Gala afterparty

“This beautiful young pop star, such a stunning girl in this pink dress with a knife in her hand in broad daylight in this almost pastoral, beautiful, sunlit, glinting image—I saw it, and I was like, ‘That’s so me,” she says. “I could already see it as a painting when I saw the image.”

You might be surprised to learn that Wise and Rodrigo never met before the painting was finished. Shortly after Wise submitted the final piece, the two creative powerhouses met at a Met Gala afterparty. “If she weren’t Olivia Rodrigo, the pop star, and I had met her in the wild, I would have wanted to paint her anyway,” she says.