Artist and poet Cristine Brache’s paintings are like half-developed polaroids of anonymous models lost to time. But in a recent body of work reacting to the eerie legacy of slain Playboy bunny Dorothy Stratten, Brache is determined to return identity and agency to those who were robbed of it. Words by Casper Kelly.
I’ve long been fascinated by artist and poet Cristine Brache’s paintings. I first saw them on Instagram, bunny-eared Playboy models rendered through ghostly magenta and cerulean. When I attended the opening night of her newest exhibition titled Centerfolds (showing at Bernheim Gallery in London from 12 February until 2 April), I couldn’t get close enough to the paintings – something about them kept me away. They’re phantom images, glowing like a television set far away, almost vapour-like. They’re the ghosts of porno past.
Her Playboy subjects are famous women; famous for their legs, their breasts, their skin, their image. But through Brache’s glacial soft-focus, achieved through delicate strokes of oil and ink underneath thick layers of encaustic wax, the women become anonymous. Traces of retro porn kitsch are still visible through the tender distortions: bright orange nail polish, cherry red lips, the hot pink of their sexualised leporidae corsets. But their faces are just faces, bereft of true identity, turning the sexual images that once ruled our visual culture into hauntological objects, half-exposed Polaroids, a wet dream dried up.
The identity of Brache’s main character however, is undeniable: it’s Dorothy Stratten, a woman who went from a teenager working in a Dairy Queen to a Playboy sex symbol to being murdered by her psychotic ex-husband all within three years. Stratten’s late years were a kaleidoscopic nightmare of misogyny, objectification, and abuse. Upon discovering that Stratten was also a poet, Cristine had found a muse – and a poem of hers even features in Cristine’s second poetry collection Goodnight Sweet Thing (2024), which reads “The only sacrifice / To live in this heaven / This Disneyland / Where people are the games.”
Three years after Stratten’s murder, Bob Fosse directed a biopic based on Stratten’s life, career, and demise in a film called Star 80, which features Cristine’s secondary muse – Mariel Hemingway’s depiction of Dorothy Stratten. She’s the mythical Dorothy, the only Dorothy who is depicted as herself, an intelligent and ambitious person. Cristine mourns both realities of Dorothy Stratten – the demise of the person and the demise of her image. Nobody remembers the slain Playboy bunny, although Fosse’s tragic flick has garnered a cult status. And a large part of Brache’s work is about correcting that – but it’s not easy, nor should it be.
For years, Brache has dedicated herself to depicting the haunted house of mirrors that is Hollywood and the porno industry – in paintings such as Trophy Winners, After The Pageant and Table Dancing, Brache shows us women showered in camera flashes and validation, tactically employed by industry predators. We know the real prize is the soul – and it’s been sold. These works, in their almost antiseptic aesthetic, suspend like carcasses drained of all blood. With icy sheens complicated by textural scarring from an orbital sander, the crystallised images appear like looking through teary eyes. The porn-ghosts which glow within the canvas guide the viewer toward central works depicting Stratten, the metaphorical matriarch of Brache’s entire body of work.
Often displayed as diptychs, Brache combines real centerfolds featuring Stratten and Star 80’s recreations of the iconic photos – and in the process, prompts the viewer to interrogate the falsehood of filmic images. Which is the real Dorothy Stratten? Did we ever see the real Dorothy Stratten? Brache paints both the real, nude Stratten and the reimagined, naked Stratten – the difference is the former is without clothes and the latter is ashamed without clothes.
In Dorothy Dipytch, Brache creates a mural-in-memoriam through eight panels, each containing the oneiric spirit of Dorothy’s haunting face. They appear like a teenage boy’s smutty bedroom wall, except they’ve been long forgotten and sun-bleached for decades, losing all vibrancy. An evaporating image.
It’s in Centerfold, the aptly-titled centerpiece for Brache’s saga of bunny opuses, where I find myself the most haunted. At five feet long, it’s a fragile fresco that contains a multitude of images – in particular, it calls to mind the various ways our visual culture has produced images of disposed women – is she in a permanent coma? Drowned in the bath? Stuck in a freezer? With its pronounced layers of wax, compounds of time further Stratten away from us, making it seem as though she’s trapped under a frozen lake like an ancient artefact. If only she may be thawed out, she might still be alive.
Most of all, a lot of Brache’s work reminds one of a “dead wife flashback”, a cinematic trope that functions as a narrative engine for male grief, depicting lovers as ghosts in sun-drenched memories of galloping through wheat fields; flattening a woman’s life into a singular tragic event. But Brache’s paintings push far beyond toothless Hollywood images, transforming these typically warm-hued cliches into permanent, chilling facts whilst literalising that flattening through the form of the canvas itself – Stratten is tragically doomed to live on through mere images. The spectral inside the tactile. The ghost in the painting. The ghost in the movie. The ghost in the painting of the movie.
When I met Brache, I only really had one question: “how did it feel to take something as heavy and rough as an orbital sander to Dorothy’s face?” Brache was taken aback. I don’t think it’s a defilement of her image, I reassured her later, but a necessarily violent act that reveals the degradation of memory, particularly in reference to how women are remembered. Brache has created a tribute without nostalgic excess, she’s scrubbed off the Playboy gloss to reach the lost women inside. A clearer autopsy of the celebrity image is created, one that prevails over any Hollywood adaptation – by partially destroying her own haunted images, Brache gets closer than anyone else to lifting the curse.
