Artist Cristine Brache was impressed to create her new present at London’s Bernheim Gallery, Centerfolds, when she discovered that Dorothy Stratten – the Playboy Playmate who was brutally murdered by her estranged husband in 1980, when she was simply 20-years-old – wrote poetry. It was a reality by no means acknowledged throughout Stratten’s life or within the manifold documentations made after her demise. These included The Killing of the Unicorn, written by her boyfriend and famed film director Peter Bogdanovich (who began relationship Statten when he was in his 40s and he or she was in her teenagers), Star 80, directed by Bob Fosse, and numerous made-for-TV films.
Centerfolds makes an attempt to create a dialogue between these two features of Stratten: the personal younger artist and the general public intercourse image who was taken benefit of by practically each man in her life (Hugh Hefner, Bogdanovich, and her pimp-turned-husband-turned assassin). In doing so, Brache goals to deliver a extra genuine picture of Stratten. It’s an admirable intention, however one which poses a query: how can a visible artist create an genuine likeness of a girl whose legacy is sort of solely an inauthentic visible building? For Brache, the reply was an unconventional however efficient one: ask celebrated New York perfumer Marissa Zappas to create a scent that would accompany the pictures.
Marissa Zappas and Cristine Brache collaborate on ‘Centerfolds’
(Picture credit score: Cristine Brache)
‘The present is deeply invested in how Stratten’s picture features inside the bigger lineage of Playboy, an infrastructure that formed, and nonetheless shapes, the development of female archetypes,’ writes Brache over electronic mail. ‘Dorothy’s visibility was each manufactured and unstable; her picture is in flux, traditionally and emotionally, and there’s an alienation particular to ladies, particularly celeb ladies, whose identities grow to be public property.’
‘[That’s why] I knew early on that Centerfolds wanted a scent element, and that it needed to be made by Marissa,’ she continues. ‘I needed the perfume to function on a extra unconscious, bodily register, to create an elegiac undertone that strikes via the viewer fairly than being checked out. My work inevitably depict her, and so they take part in objectification to some extent; that stress is unavoidable when working with a picture that historical past has already overexposed. The perfume turns into a counterpoint to that, one of many few methods to honor Stratten with out returning her to the identical visible economic system. In contrast to a picture, scent can’t be recirculated, extracted, or capitalized on in the identical manner. It resists possession; it slips from the viewer’s grasp. In that sense, it turns into one thing that may’t be taken.’
(Picture credit score: Cristine Brache)
The scent Zappas created for the present is a mix of lily of the valley, frankincense, apricot, and banana. Viewers first encounter it after they see the portray, The Effectively on the second flooring of the gallery, and by the point viewers attain the third flooring, the place the portraits of Dorothy Stratten grasp, it totally saturates the area. The concept, in response to Brache, was to create ‘a sensory arc that mirrors the conceptual one,’ as one strikes via area and witnesses how Dorothy Stratten’s likeness has been circulated and consumed over time.
Zappas has gained a loyal following for her idiosyncratic method to perfume, and this collaboration with Brache comes quickly after her work with one other exhibition, Her Scent of Thriller, at Olfactory Artwork Keller, the place she explored the rediscovery of a misplaced fragrance created for the 1960 Scent-O-Imaginative and prescient movie by the identical title which starred Elizabeth Taylor. Collaborating on this venture with Brache is a pure subsequent step, with each exhibits utilizing scent to reinforce the phantasmagoria of American consumerism with its Playboy bunnies and Hollywood starlets conjured up in celluloid and centrefolds.
For Zappas, the Centerfolds scent wanted to really feel devotional, however nonetheless retain a way of levity and life. ‘There’s reverence, however nothing actually sombre,’ she says. ‘Cristine and I had been additionally inquisitive about an concept of fruit that wasn’t completely ripe. The fact is that her life was lower brutally brief. I needed a odor that mirrored that and her luminosity.’
(Picture credit score: Cristine Brache)
Nonetheless, the perfume attracts extra intently from Brache’s work than it does Stratten herself. ‘The perfume was very a lot impressed by Cristine’s shade palettes and her general understanding and depictions of Dorothy Stratten,’ says Zappas. ‘There’s loads of the colour yellow, visually and olfactively. From the start, it was necessary to us to not create a scent that tried to “signify” Dorothy or bottle her essence. As a substitute, the aim was to reinforce and deepen the sensory world of Cristine’s present, and to behave as an atmospheric extension of the work fairly than a portrait. The perfume exists in dialog with the art work, not as a illustration of the topic.’
Collectively, then, the perfume and art work improve one another, creating an uncommon, and compelling, gallery expertise. As Zappas says, ‘introducing scent shifts the expertise from one thing purely visible into one thing extra immersive and mystical. Scent has the power to bypass mind and transfer straight into emotion. Cristine’s work already carries an inherent texturality and comfortable energy that aligns with this sort of sensory growth.’
Centerfolds runs till 2 April 2026 at Bernheim, London.
Marissa Zappas
Annabel’s Birthday Cake
Marissa Zappas
Dream Sequence
