MM 2024

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For her exhibition at O—Overgaden, Lyse traces the trajectory of one of the most iconic female images in media history and its shifting economic life: Marilyn Monroe’s undressed Playboy centerfold, which crowned the magazine’s first issue in 1953. Used without Monroe’s consent by Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, the image became the cornerstone of a hugely influential sex empire—stripping the female subject of autonomy while transforming her likeness into a commodity that has circulated through decades of cultural memory, private collections, and public markets. Exhibited here as a charged readymade, the work is reframed as both a notable marker in media history and a root system for how desire, sex, and the body are imagined today.

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Performative in nature, the exhibition MM—the acronym of both Marilyn Monroe and Maja Malou—mixes video, photography, text, memorabilia, and ready-mades, notably Hefner’s privately owned original of the Monroe nude: a gold-framed photograph signed on its front and kept in his Playboy Mansion until his death in 2017.

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In Lyse’s gonzo-journalistic diary essays—which, among other things, recount sessions at her New York City hot yoga studio Some Like It Hot and spotting an original Warhol painting of Marilyn Monroe in a Fifth Avenue sugar daddy’s penthouse—displayed alongside private photographs and her collection of merch and memorabilia, from rotting cookies to her Julien’s Auctions bidding paddle, she traces how the intertwined stories of Monroe and Hefner continue to reverberate today, circulating between the personal and the political, the past and the present, as a kind of origin point for contemporary sexual consciousness.

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Two videos follow the artist herself. One documents Lyse’s pursuit to an auction in Hollywood to acquire the Monroe nude; the other shows her having a Playboy bunny butt tattoo erased. In both, she charts how Monroe and Hefner continue to stamp our bodies, lives, and minds as enduring cornerstones of collective Western sex culture.

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Employing Monroe’s infamous nude and the soundtrack from its auction—as a complex contemporary symbol of how identities are continuously constructed, circulated, and sexualized—MM invites us to study pop-cultural media history as artifacts of our time. In doing so, the exhibition reframes the Playboy centerfold not merely as a relic of mid-century celebrity culture, but as an artifact whose economic, political, and symbolic life demands renewed scrutiny. The work asks us to look again—through the lens of art history, feminist critique, and pop-cultural archaeology—at an image that has long shaped how bodies are imagined, consumed, and commodified. And simply: who owns an image?                                                

 

Exhibition text by Rhea Dall, Director and Chief Curator, O—Overgaden