Centerfolds
I scented Cristine Brache's latest show.
There is a particular violence in omission.
Cristine Brache’s Centerfolds, opening this February at Bernheim Gallery in London, begins with one such omission: the fact that Dorothy Stratten wrote poetry. Not as a footnote, not as a curiosity, but seriously and privately and alone. This detail is nearly absent from her biographies and documentaries, completely swallowed by the spectacle of her image and the brutality of her death. The centerfold survives, and as such, her inner life does not.
When Cristine first told me this, my first thought was, of course, Dorothy Stratten wrote poetry. Of course, there were words that were entirely her own, words we could never have imagined or ascribed to her. And of course, that part of her was irrelevant to the story we prefer to tell.
Centerfolds by the brilliant Cristine Brache unfolds across three interrelated bodies of work, each circling questions of persona, obsolescence, alienation, and power. Who holds it, who is stripped of it, and who gets remembered? Cristine’s work listens to the distance between the woman who wrote poems and the woman frozen in cultural memory. As Cristine writes,
“Like Monroe, Stratten’s image endures, but where Monroe’s repetition in Warhol’s work cemented her place in the pantheon of icons, Stratten’s cultural afterlife remains in flux. I capture this paradox: Stratten as both cipher and individual, deeply known yet forever unknowable. As Stratten wrote in her poem:
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.”
A poet herself, Cristine approaches Stratten as a writer. What emerges is not nostalgia, but something lonelier and more precise: a meditation on how inner lives are often flattened by images, how femininity is archived primarily as image, and how the labor of being seen can erase the act of being.
I collaborated with Cristine on a custom scent for the exhibition. Unlike an image, scent cannot be consumed all at once. It changes, it is forgotten, and then remembered again. It also changes depending on where you stand and how long you stay. You move through the building, and the work meets you slowly, on its own terms. No frame or centerfold. Just presence. A strange lily, incense and vague banana walk into an art gallery… are we in Florida? The Playboy Mansion? A private lagoon in St. Tropez?!
I often think about how women (and even myself) are remembered: incorrectly, incompletely. Nobody has any control over how they’re remembered, I guess. How much of our writing, our thinking, our solitude, never survives the archive, should we be so lucky to have one, one day. Centerfolds does not try to correct history. It asks us to sit with its absences, and to feel what was never allowed to be seen.
If you happen to be in London, please go see it! I deeply love Cristine’s work and I’m so honored to be a part of her show.
Centerfolds
Cristine Brache
Bernheim, 1 New Burlington St, London W1S 2JA
Opening Reception:
Thursday, 12 February 2026 | 6–8 PM
Exhibition Dates:
12 February – 02 April 2026
Love