“What Is She About to Do With That Damn Knife?”—Chloe Wise On Creating a Painting for Olivia Rodrigo’s New Album

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

Olivia Rodrigo's forthcoming album rollout has made one thing clear: she's not just making pop music — she's building a full visual universe. From dancing through Versailles in a pink coat that reads like a deleted scene from Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, to channeling Frida Kahlo's Henry Ford Hospital in her second single "the cure," Rodrigo is threading art history directly into her era. The latest move? Commissioning New York painter Chloe Wise for a limited-edition vinyl cover that might be the most compelling artifact she's released yet.

The painting, Carve our names (2026), is exactly as loaded as the title suggests. Rodrigo stands in a pastoral, sunlit clearing — babydoll dress, tree canopy overhead — gripping an open switchblade and staring at it with an expression that gives nothing away. According to Harper's Bazaar, Wise herself framed the image's central tension perfectly: "What is she about to do with that damn knife?" It's gorgeous and faintly menacing, which is precisely the Wise signature — her portraits of women have always occupied that uneasy space between decorative and devious.

A Return to Canvas, on Purpose

Wise had actually stepped away from painting when Rodrigo's team reached out. She was deep in preparations for Extrasensory, a museum show at Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger — a three-channel video installation exploring religion and UFO lore, about as far from a pop album as you can get. She came back to the canvas anyway, working in secret at a friend's studio over six months. What pulled her in was recognizing something of herself in Rodrigo's instinct to play with genre and aesthetics. "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 said, calling in from Basel mid-install. When she saw the reference image — shot by photographer Chad Moore — she didn't need convincing. "I could already see it as a painting."

Wise built her reputation over the past decade on satirical, richly observed work — the bread bag sculptures, the Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe riffs, the meticulously staged portraits of women from her orbit. Carve our names is the only painting she made in the last six months, and it shows: it has the specificity of someone revisiting a language they know by instinct. The collaboration's logistics were unconventional — Wise and Rodrigo didn't actually meet until after the painting was finished, at a Met Gala afterparty. No notes exchanged over Zoom, no awkward sittings. Just two people who apparently already understood each other's visual vocabulary before they were in the same room.

When the work you make is so aligned with someone else's world that you'd have wanted to create it regardless of who asked — that's not a brand deal, that's a genuine artistic match.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.