The impetus behind Cristine Brache’s latest exhibition Centerfolds was the artist’s discovery that former Playboy bunny and aspiring Hollywood actress Dorothy Stratten wrote poetry. Today, Stratten is a minor player in popular culture, her legacy shining through small, cult-like fragments of the internet, such as a dedicated, if slightly creepy, fan page that Brache shows me, mid-interview. The website has the air of a missing person page mixed with an early-2010s Tumblr-blog dedicated to pop star Lana Del Rey’s initial faux-ingénue persona. In 1980, Stratten was named Playmate of the Year. This formed part of a marketing scheme deployed by her then boss, Hugh Hefner: a strategised attempt to rehabilitate Playboy’s salacious image to the more conservative Hollywood star-making industry. Stratten was murdered the same year—aged 20—by her estranged husband, Paul Snider.
Centerfolds displays three separate bodies of work across the Bernheim gallery townhouse in London that contextualise, and to some extent fictionalise, the life and legacy of Stratten. On the ground floor Brache has placed The Bunny Series, which positions the bunny suit as a mid-century archetypal symbol of femininity, as ubiquitous as Marilyn Monroe’s pin-curls or Sophia Loren’s sheer blouse. The difference? Most bunnies were anonymous, their identities fading into obscurity. Only their ears and tails remain, embodied in Brache’s method of encaustic painting—a multi-layered process using hot wax and pigment that lends each work a vintage, oneiric haze. The Bunny Series has a disquieting resemblance to images from Jeffrey Epstein’s Island, where women appear as props as opposed to individuals.
In Star 80, Dorothy’s 1980 Playmate shoot is placed alongside its recreation from Bob Fosse’s 1983 biopic of the same name, where actress Mariel Hemingway imbues Stratten with an innocence untrue to life. In I’m not a hypocrite. I did it, didn’t I? (2025) Brache hangs the censored, R-rated version of Stratten’s shoot beneath the fully nude original.
While with Dorothy Diptych (2025), Brache shows a body of work that leans on Warhol’s icon-making portraits of Marilyn Monroe. We are close up to Stratten now in painted and cropped photographic reproductions of her face. Both iconic and near-unrecognisable, they are a semiotic dis-assemblage of a star who died before she could become immortal. Brache’s tenderness for Stratten, as well as her fondness for unearthing truths left behind by a chauvinistic narrativisation of her life, is clear. As Brache tells me when we speak over a video call, her tone slightly sad and bittersweet as she describes the portraits of Dorothy: “In each iteration, the original is lost.”