Reba Maybury’s artistic practice harnesses her role as a dominatrix with the alias Mistress Rebecca: most of her artworks are instruction pieces carried out by her submissive men under her orders.

At O—Overgaden, Maybury shows a 2025 painting series based on paint-by-numbers kits. The series reproduces a suite of pastels on paper by the French impressionist painter Edgar Degas depicting working-class women—widely thought to be sex workers—washing. Shown in “ungainly positions,” the frame-filling female nudes are carrying out the unseen labor of intimacy or sex work: keeping the body clean. In this series, Degas’s framing is inherently voyeuristic, watching the women from behind or with their faces turned away, as depersonalized, consumable bodies that do not look back. While Degas’s heralded series seems to hide its inherent male dominance in subtle light and soft colors, the crude grittiness of the submissives’ reproductions reveals a brutal reality to the motifs.

In O—Overgaden’s second space, scent diffusers distribute a counterfeit version of Dior’s cologne Sauvage, the French word meaning rough, offensive, or savage. The face of the cologne for the last ten years has been Johnny Depp, the actor simultaneously accused of domestic abuse by his ex-partner, Amber Heard, in two highly publicized court cases. During trial, Depp’s defense team employed the recurrent strategy “deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender” (DARVO) in which critique is deflected by inverting the roles of aggressor and victim. In 2023 Johnny Depp renewed his contract with Dior for $20 million, the largest ever men’s fragrance deal.

The back space introduces an element of surveillance: watching the audience watching the watched and washing women being sexualized even while completing this most banal of tasks. By outsourcing the menial labor of production, Maybury’s practice plays out dynamics of domination and subjugation, inverting the roles of observing and observed, even aggressor and victim, layered into both our gendered, private lives and our public, cultural institutions. If the dominatrix as a sex worker is typically seen as a “dehumanized” fantasy—not unlike how the artist is often understood as society’s entertaining underdog—here it is the submissives, and indeed also the visitors, that are put to work and watched, subverting and perverting the stereotypical image of who serves who.

The exhibition is supported by: