Centrefolds at Bernheim gallery: a scented exhibition inspired by a Hollywood tragedy

Dorothy Diptych, by Cristine Brache — Dorothy Diptych

(Image credit: Cristine Brache)

Artist Cristine Brache was inspired to create her new show at London’s Bernheim Gallery, Centerfolds, when she found out that Dorothy Stratten – the Playboy Playmate who was brutally murdered by her estranged husband in 1980, when she was just 20-years-old – wrote poetry. It was a fact never acknowledged during Stratten’s life or in the manifold documentations made after her death. These included The Killing of the Unicorn, written by her boyfriend and famed movie director Peter Bogdanovich (who started dating Statten when he was in his 40s and she was in her teens), Star 80, directed by Bob Fosse, and countless made-for-TV movies.

Centerfolds attempts to create a dialogue between those two aspects of Stratten: the private young artist and the public sex symbol who was taken advantage of by nearly every man in her life (Hugh Hefner, Bogdanovich, and her pimp-turned-husband-turned murderer). In doing so, Brache aims to bring a more authentic image of Stratten. It’s an admirable aim, but one that poses a question: how can a visual artist create an authentic likeness of a woman whose legacy is almost entirely an inauthentic visual construction? For Brache, the answer was an unconventional but effective one: ask celebrated New York perfumer Marissa Zappas to create a scent that could accompany the images.

Marissa Zappas and Cristine Brache collaborate on ‘Centerfolds’

Headshots, by Cristine Brache — Headshots

‘The show is deeply invested in how Stratten’s image functions within the larger lineage of Playboy, an infrastructure that shaped, and still shapes, the construction of feminine archetypes,’ writes Brache over email. ‘Dorothy’s visibility was both manufactured and unstable; her image is in flux, historically and emotionally, and there’s an alienation specific to women, especially celebrity women, whose identities become public property.’

‘[That’s why] I knew early on that Centerfolds needed a scent component, and that it had to be made by Marissa,’ she continues. ‘I wanted the fragrance to operate on a more unconscious, bodily register, to create an elegiac undertone that moves through the viewer rather than being looked at. My paintings inevitably depict her, and they participate in objectification to some degree; that tension is unavoidable when working with an image that history has already overexposed. The fragrance becomes a counterpoint to that, one of the few ways to honor Stratten without returning her to the same visual economy. Unlike an image, scent can’t be recirculated, extracted, or capitalized on in the same way. It resists possession; it slips from the viewer’s grasp. In that sense, it becomes something that can’t be taken.’

Apprehension, Cristine Brache — Apprehension

The scent Zappas created for the show is a blend of lily of the valley, frankincense, apricot, and banana. Viewers first encounter it when they see the painting, The Well on the second floor of the gallery, and by the time viewers reach the third floor, where the portraits of Dorothy Stratten hang, it fully saturates the space. The idea, according to Brache, was to create ‘a sensory arc that mirrors the conceptual one,’ as one moves through space and witnesses how Dorothy Stratten’s likeness has been circulated and consumed over time.

Zappas has gained a devoted following for her idiosyncratic approach to fragrance, and this collaboration with Brache comes soon after her work with another exhibition, Her Scent of Mystery, at Olfactory Art Keller, where she explored the rediscovery of a lost perfume created for the 1960 Smell-O-Vision film by the same name which starred Elizabeth Taylor. Collaborating on this project with Brache is a natural next step, with both shows using scent to enhance the phantasmagoria of American consumerism with its Playboy bunnies and Hollywood starlets conjured up in celluloid and centrefolds.

For Zappas, the Centerfolds scent needed to feel devotional, but still retain a sense of levity and life. ‘There’s reverence, but nothing really sombre,’ she says. ‘Cristine and I were also interested in an idea of fruit that wasn't totally ripe. The reality is that her life was cut brutally short. I wanted a smell that reflected that and her luminosity.’

After the Pageant, by Cristine Brache — After the Pageant

Still, the fragrance draws more closely from Brache’s work than it does Stratten herself. ‘The fragrance was very much inspired by Cristine’s color palettes and her overall understanding and depictions of Dorothy Stratten,’ says Zappas. ‘There's a lot of the color yellow, visually and olfactively. From the beginning, it was important to us not to create a scent that attempted to “represent” Dorothy or bottle her essence. Instead, the goal was to enhance and deepen the sensory world of Cristine’s show, and to act as an atmospheric extension of the work rather than a portrait. The fragrance exists in conversation with the artwork, not as a representation of the subject.’

Together, then, the fragrance and artwork enhance each other, creating an unusual, and compelling, gallery experience. As Zappas says, ‘introducing scent shifts the experience from something purely visual into something more immersive and mystical. Smell has the ability to bypass intellect and move directly into emotion. Cristine’s work already carries an inherent texturality and soft power that aligns with this kind of sensory expansion.’

Centerfolds runs until 2 April 2026 at Bernheim, London.

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Mary Cleary is a writer based in London and New York. Previously beauty & grooming editor at Wallpaper*, she is now a contributing editor, alongside writing for various publications on all aspects of culture.