At Bernheim, London, the artist’s impossibly smooth paintings draw on models from the notorious magazine, rendering them hallucinatory, enigmatic, out of reach
It’s difficult to describe the kaleidoscopic sense of time travel one feels when walking into ‘Centerfolds’, the candy-coloured, frankincense- and lily of the valley-scented exhibition by Miami-born artist Cristine Brache that spans the three floors of Bernheim’s Mayfair townhouse. When I say one, I mean I, but probably you, too, especially if you’re a woman of a particular age (like Brache, I was born in 1984). But there is also a timelessness to the show, which includes 16 paintings and two sculptures (all works 2025), as well as a tailor-made scent produced by the New York-based perfumer Marissa Zappas. There’s a feeling of plus ça change that is intimately linked to certain qualities of girl- and womanhood – the aspects that are hardest to pin down because they are relational, and as such social, political and cultural, circulating through the ages like a terrible, beautiful dream.
The images of girls and women (the line is blurry) in Brache’s paintings derive from Playboy magazine. They appear alone, in pairs or in groups, their colourful satin bodices tight and bright, rabbit ears tall and pert, cotton tails round and white and bigger than I had understood of the characteristic uniform worn by the so-called ‘bunnies’ of Hugh Hefner’s empire. Sometimes they appear in duplicate, as in Muse, in which a bunny, clad in a golden costume, poses for a moustachioed painter who renders her just slightly larger than life. His vision of the young woman who stands gazing inscrutably into the distance is, however, garish and exaggerated, a world away from Brache’s painterly universe.
Brache’s paintings – made using oil, ink and encaustic on silk or cotton on wood – are at once precise and hallucinatory, based on source material but transforming it, with subtle and breathtaking artistry, into something just out of reach, insubstantial, phantasmic. From afar, several of Brache’s women appear in darkened and twilight shades and in soft-focus, as if seen through a haze. Though Brache’s surfaces are impossibly smooth, her brushstrokes all but imperceptible, this quality intensifies up close: you blink, as if the image might become clearer, but of course it intends to stay at bay. There will, and perhaps should, always be a distance between what is projected onto these women and what they saw (see) in or wanted (want) from the wide world they look out at, which includes us standing here, trying to read them.
The most enigmatic of Brache’s centrefolds, the woman whose visage and form occupy the topmost floors of the gallery, is Dorothy Stratten, Playboy Playmate of the Year in 1980, when she was just 20. Discovered by her future husband, Paul Snyder, while working in a Vancouver Dairy Queen when still in high school, she moved quickly from the pages of Playboy to a starring role in Peter Bogdanovich’s romantic comedy They All Laughed (1981). She never saw the film’s release, however, as she was murdered by Snyder in August 1980.
Stratten is the ultimate duplicate, having been resurrected soon after her death by Jamie Lee Curtis and Mariel Hemingway in the biopics Death of a Centerfold (1981) and Star 80 (1983), respectively. Brache’s work self-consciously offers further iterations. In Headshots, Repose and Playmate of the Year (Study), we see Hemingway and Stratten in diptych, the one performing the other like a mise-en-abîme of tragic, blighted celebrity. In Dorothy, Centerfold and Mourning Song, Stratten’s face takes centre stage – cropped close and rendered in eerie, aquamarine tones – while in Dorothy Diptych she appears eight times, in a composition akin to Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (1962). Stratten, though, is afforded infinitely more dimensionality: this may be an elegy, but it is also a celebration, a second life, a beginning without end.
Cristine Brache ‘Centerfolds’ is on view at Bernheim, London, until 2 April
