Executed in 2019 and included in her first solo exhibition in London at Almine Rech Gallery, Anonymous Now exemplifies Wise’s renowned exploration of portraiture, greatly inspired by the exquisite detail of the Dutch Golden Age and the vivid colour and hyperrealism of the Pre-Raphaelites. Her paintings are notable for featuring multiple people in group portraits, rather than single subjects, with her female sitters exuding a sense of friendship and personal intimacy by posing closely together and gazing directly at the viewer. The portrait is reminiscent of Peter Lindbergh’s iconic 1989 photograph that marked the very first supermodels’ ascension to pop culture stardom. Flirting with legibility through its associations with modern advertising, theatre production images or even yearbook photos, the composition of Anonymous Now has a glamorous, commercial quality, with its homogenising effect expressed in the work’s title. The monumental size of the canvas amplifies its sitters to the same grand scale, affirming their presence to the viewer. With her signature wry sense of humor, Wise portrays identity as paradoxically magnified and rendered indistinct as it.mes ets consumerist fashion, offering a poignant commentary on the unspoken dynamics that maintain the individual’s participation amongst the group in contemporary society.

The frontally-facing group depicted in the present image is destabilised by the male figure to the right of the canvas facing away from the viewer. A nod to René Margritte’s surrealist iconography, the boy’s posture suspends this meticulous, hyperphysical portrait in an ambiguous space, denying the grounds for staged communion and challenging the promise of any neat resolution of the tension between the self and the group. The reclining figure at the centre of the composition nods to Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and Wise’s contemporary investigation into the trope of the male gaze and the classical tableaux. Born in Montreal in 1990, Chloe Wise has executed a body of work that spans sculpture, installation, video and painting. Her work has been the subject of a number of recent exhibitions in New York, Geneva and Montreal, and now resides in the permanent collects ions of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, among others. Revelling in the gap between reality and fantasy, her portraiture is a uniquely ethereal and surreal examination of our relationships with each other and with the modern world.