Cristine Brache: ‘The Playboy Bunnies Look Like Aliens’

Cristine Brache b. 1984, United States Follow +

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.”  

LET: When did your obsession with Stratten and the Playboy mansion begin?

CB: I first became obsessed with Dorothy Stratten as an individual before the Playboy mansion. I wanted to honour her in a way that felt appropriate, which I don’t think had been done publicly because of the way men’s agendas shaped her retellings: the biopic, the biography, in news and media.

“Men wanted Dorothy to be this figure that wasn’t threatening to them”

I also write poetry myself, and I felt offended that her poetry had been excluded from her biography. Men wanted Dorothy to be this kind of figure that wasn’t threatening to them. The idea of a woman writing poetry doesn’t suit them because it implies she has thoughts of her own. I started looking at pictures of the Playboy bunny suit; it looks so abstract and bizarre, with distance, and it doesn’t feel real. The Playboy bunnies look like aliens.

LET: How does that icon status, this idea of a forgotten celebrity, play into your practice as a whole?

CB: The choice of having the large-scale portraits and repetitive diptych followed on from Andy Warhol’s Marilyn diptychs. Before Dorothy’s death, a lot of people said that she was going to be the next Marilyn Monroe. Even though people don’t know her face, when you look at the works, it’s like: “Who is this person?”

LET: Do you have a favourite moment in the narrative you build throughout the show?

CB: I’ve loved the doubles the most. Some people struggle with them because they’re pornographic nudes. But most women I meet love them. There was an emotional, inarticulable feeling that I had in response to seeing them, and just a compulsion to stare at them side by side. Dorothy’s are very X-rated. She’s nude: fully vulnerable and physically exposed. Then you have Mariel’s depiction in Star 80, which is R-rated. There’s a feeling of censoring her intention in this depiction, like it’s shameful that she did the nude photoshoots for Playboy.

“She was going to be the next Marilyn Monroe”

LET: Do you feel you’re processing the tragedy of Dorothy’s death through the slow and many-layered process of encaustic painting?

CB: Yes, though I think of it less as processing the tragedy of her death and more as processing historical and contemporary misogyny and the double bind women constantly find themselves in. Dorothy’s image was captured under the direction and desire of men and circulated constantly, but who she was outside of that—her interiority—remains largely inaccessible because it was never properly documented. The layered opacity of encaustic is a way to visualise what is lost over time as a result of these things, which can’t be quantified. I’m very drawn to the sorrow of that passing, and to the gaps that inevitably form in history and language. Dorothy’s story seems to crystallise that for me. There is always the question of the look in her eyes. It becomes almost like a Rorschach test.

What frustrates me most about Dorothy is when people say she died because of Playboy or Hollywood exploitation. I think she would have died regardless of Hollywood because she was with a domestic abuser, Paul Snider, who killed himself after he killed her. They didn’t have language for, or any understanding of, the psychology of domestic violence then. So a lot of her experience was minimised and inarticulable.

LET: If you had to curate a show with three artists living, dead, or forgotten, who would you include?

CB: I would choose David Lynch and commission a video piece. I would choose Joan of the Angels, a historical figure—an Ursuline nun associated with the possessions of Loudun. They lived a hundred years before the Salem witch trials, so they’re a precursor to that hysteria in the United States. All of them were female, and their possessions were extremely sexual in nature. I think it’s an interesting way in which women have claimed power in these situations. She also had the names of the four saints who helped her tattooed on her hand. So, I would commission her to do a performance art piece. Then, the third would be the person who painted the caves of Lascaux. I feel like there would be a kind of psychic energy between the three.

“The idea of a woman writing poetry doesn’t suit men because it implies she has thoughts of her own”

LET: If you had to choose a rare book to own, which would you want?

CB: Rene Ricard’s God With Revolver. I had a copy in high school, bought it for $12, gave it to a friend, and it got lost. Now it’s worth over $1,000. I would also want Dorothy Stratten’s unfinished memoir—it’s about 14 or 16 pages. I know that the private investigator, who was working on behalf of her ex-husband Paul Snider, had it. He was hired by Playboy afterwards. I’d like to see the unredacted version, not edited by Hugh Hefner.

LET: You mentioned poetry before. Do you have a favourite poem of Dorothy’s, or yours?

CB: I do, and it inspired two of the sculptural works in the exhibition.

It’s here, everything —

Everything anyone ever

Dreamed of, and more.

But love is lost:

The only sacrifice

To live in this heaven,

This Disneyland

Where people are the games.

(This is the opening to Brache’s poetry collection, Goodnight Sweet Thing (2024)) —[O]

Palette Cleanser is a weekly interview series with the artists you need to watch, as selected by our editors.

Main image: Cristine Brache, Table Daning (2025). Oil, ink and encaustic on cotton and wood. Courtesy Cristine Brache and Bernheim Gallery. Photo: Eva Herzog.