On a sweltering afternoon this past July, I paid a visit to the artist Chloe Wise in her midtown Manhattan studio. “You have great timing,” she says as I step into her light-flooded space, where she also lives. “I literally just took the bread out of the oven.”

This came as no surprise to me, as Wise, 34, is famous not only for her punchy portraits and her oozing sculptures of food, but for her homemade focaccia as well. She picked up baking as a hobby, “like everybody,” in 2020. Later we’ll tuck in to that delicious sourdough, topped, of course, with butter (another Wise subject). But it’s not the food I’m here for.

I’ve come to discuss her latest body of work: a suite of moody paintings of people glancing skyward. She describes them as Caravaggio meets Spielberg—eerie and uncanny and f

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