In a major music-art world crossover, pop star Olivia Rodrigo has enlisted artist Chloe Wise to create the cover art for the singer’s eagerly anticipated forthcoming album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love.
The collectible vinyl cover features Wise’s oil painting Carve our names (2026), a portrait of Rodrigo clad in a pink babydoll dress and holding a glinting knife with foreboding intensity. The collectible vinyl is exclusively available through the singer’s website ahead of the album’s June 12 release.
Wise, who first rose to fame in the 2010s with her sculptural “Bread Bags” that winked at consumer culture, has become, in recent years, known for her psychologically charged portraits. Her 2025 New York exhibition “Myth Information” at Almine Rech, her representing gallery, blended influences from film noir to extraterrestrial experience.
Wise, who first rose to fame in the 2010s with her sculptural “Bread Bags” that winked at consumer culture, has become, in recent years, known for her psychologically charged portraits. Her 2025 New York exhibition “Myth Information” at Almine Rech, her representing gallery, blended influences from film noir to extraterrestrial experience.
Carve our names is the only painting Wise has made in the past six months. When Rodrigo approached Wise about the commission, the Canadian artist had taken a hiatus from painting to focus on “Extrasensory,” her forthcoming video- and installation-based exhibition at Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger in Switzerland, which opens on June 12th. Still, Wise jumped at the opportunity, seeing affinities between Rodrigo’s creative world and her artistic practice.
Carve our names was inspired, in part, by a recent photograph of Rodrigo by photographer Chad Moore. Wise leans into a cinematic ambiguity in the scene. Is Rodrigo going to carve the name of her beloved into tree bark, a classic adolescent gesture, or is something more sinister afoot?
Rodrigo told Dazed that she’s a longtime admirer of Wise’s work and was “beyond excited” to collaborate. “She blew me away with what she created, and I can’t wait for fans to get this into their hands,” Rodrigo said.
Wise is the most recent in a string of contemporary women artists to be tapped for a pop star portrait. In 2025, Lily Allen commissioned a portrait from rising artist Nieves González for the cover of her album West End Girl. Artist Issy Wood, meanwhile, painted Charli XCX’s portrait for the November 2025 cover of Vanity Fair.
Wise is delighted by the Rodrigo collaboration, but, for now, is focused on installing her Basel show, which mines the intersection of consumerism, religious worship, and the supernatural.“It’s a crazy roller coaster through all of these different realms,” she said. “There are angels and Victoria's Secret angels. Stay tuned.”
