New Exhibition at the Tate Modern Looks at Leigh Bowery Through His Fashion Creations, Art and a Collection of Photographs and Videos

If ‘80s London subcultures — punk, New Romantics, Goth, and the Blitz Kids — were placed in a blender, the outcome would look something like Leigh Bowery, the colorfully eccentric and provocative performance artist and club promoter who died 30 years ago.

He cofounded the club Taboo at Maximus in Leicester Square in 1985 and even though it only lasted 18 months, the spot drew an A-list crowd that included the likes of Boy George, George Michael, John Galliano and Lucian Freud dancing on its sticky floors.

Bowery’s party costumes and body of work across fashion, music and performance is being recognized in an exhibition at the Tate Modern that will open on Feb. 27. The show looks at him through the lens of his fashion creations, art and a collection of photographs and videos taken by Nick Knight, Peter Doig, Fergus Greer and Baillie Walsh.

His towering 6-foot-1 inch build is also captured in a nude portrait by Freud.

Larger Than Life

The exhibition makes space for his larger-than-life ideas that have served as a source of inspiration for designers such as Lee Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Rick Owens and Rei Kawakubo, although none of their designs are on display.

“A whole other show just about Leigh’s influence could be done, but it was important to treat him like we would any other artist at the Tate by focusing on their work,” says Fiontán Moran, assistant curator at the Tate Modern.

Bowery pushed boundaries, made friends and lost them, and captured the attention of London during the era of Margaret Thatcher, protests and the AIDS epidemic. He died at age 33 on New Year’s Eve in 1994 from an AIDS-related illness at Middlesex Hospital in Westminster.

“He was a figure who contributed a great deal to the creative life of the city and created works and explored ideas that continue to have relevance in terms of what the body means to society, or what club culture means rather than just a frivolous activity — within those spaces, a lot of generative ideas around art making and fashion design were emerging. Leigh crosses over through so many disciplines,” says Moran.

The Australian-born artist migrated to London in 1980 at the age of 19 in hopes of becoming part of the punk fashion movement. He had studied fashion design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in his home country.

“Punk suggested a way of thinking about clothing that wasn’t just about practicality, but was actually about communicating an ideology in some ways, and also something that was resistant to mainstream society,” says Moran.

Bowery’s fashion stint was successful, short-lived and caused an uproar. He showed designs of frayed edges and distressed fabrics in New York and Tokyo with his friend Rachel Auburn in 1983 that are featured in the first room of the exhibition titled “Home/Getting Ready.”

The Evening Standard newspaper reported on the upheaval, writing that “screams were heard on the subway last week, not another mugging, but a couple of young British designers.” 

In New York, their collections were briefly picked up by Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. 

“He very quickly realized he didn’t really want to deal with the mass production and the realities of being a fashion designer,” says Moran, adding that it was around this time that he befriended the choreographer Michael Clark.

Bowery would go on to create costumes with free rein for Clark’s productions and sometimes even starred in them.

These helped inform his foray into performance art but one costume for Clark’s “Mmm…”, a production based on birth and rebirth, would be the demise of his working relationship with the choreographer. 

Bowery had created two blobby looks for the show and one of the costumes had the phrase “I’m a c–t” printed on it, which Clark disagreed with.

“Sometimes Leigh would appear on stage wearing the controversial costume instead,” says Moran.

Bowery didn’t stop there to enrage.

He would pierce his cheeks with safety pins to fasten on fake lips; roam the streets of London in drab clothing, bad wigs and high heels to continually subvert the idea of normality, and at an AIDS benefit in 1994 at The Fridge, a club in Brixton, the police had to get involved. 

Bowery had been experimenting with enemas to create a human fountain — during his performance he wasn’t able to get onto the floor properly so instead he bent over and sprayed the front row with liquids from his anus.

A woman from the audience complained to the authorities and Bowery was temporarily banned from various London clubs.

“Apparently it was the first time his friend said that they seemed to be genuinely worried for him,” says Moran.

The artist dedicated his whole life to performance and London was his stage for experimentation. He wanted to connect with historical figures such as the dandies of the early 20th century and ’60s through his fleshy body.

Sue Tilley, author of the republished book “Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon” (Thames & Hudson) from 1997 remembers the exact moment she met Bowery — it was in 1981 at the Cha Cha Club, where he was wearing cropped baggy trousers with braces, an orange checked shirt with little star studs on the front and hair that was shaved at the sides and long on top.

Bowery’s instinct to evoke emotion was all natural, says Tilley.

“He was very good at encouraging people to do things — anything good and exciting that’s happened in my life, I can put down to his influence. He introduced me to people and even though he’s dead, it still happens like that. I know that things happen because of him,” she adds, describing his star power as something that he was born with that pulled people in.

As interest in Bowery grew within creative circles, the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London invited him to stage a five-day performance. The high profile gallery represented Gerhard Richter and had previously exhibited self portraits of Andy Warhol.

At the gallery Bowery installed himself in front of a two-way mirror, where all he could see was his own reflection, and wore a different look each day made with help of Mr. Pearl, the English corset couturier, who had remade all of Bowery’s clothes from the mid-’80s because they were all dirty.

“His presence was always impressive and complex, threatening, comic, quiet, polite, intelligent and aware,” d’Offay remembers.

“Leigh responded immediately to the idea of a performance in the gallery, he was easy to work with, very professional and practical – almost a surprise as he was then by far the youngest artist we had worked with to date,” he added.

Lorcan O’Neill, who was a director at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in the ’80s said that word about the show spread without much publicity.

“People stood, leaned against the wall, sat on the floor, came with children or pets or their bags of shopping. There were students, night-clubbers, businessmen and office workers, artists and writers,” he recalls.

The Anthony d’Offay Gallery represented a major imprimatur for Bowery, taking him from a personality to an artist.

After his performance, Freud came calling and this was one of the few instances that kicked in the nerves for the overly confident and eccentric Bowery.

In a piece for the British art magazine Modern Painters, he recalls being “nervous about my naked body” because he weighed between 16 and 17 stone, or about 225 to 240 pounds.

Freud painted Bowery over the course of four years, which resulted in three paintings, and in that time Bowery let his mischievous characteristics get the best of him by entertaining the artist with his sexual escapades. He also would add small touches of paint to Freud’s portraits without him knowing and even stole two unfinished paintings that were returned after his death.

When Freud’s show opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993, the artist did not attend, but Bowery inaugurated the showcase by arriving in a burgundy Kaiser helmet and a voluminous floral Paul McCann gown with a matching gimp mask — a look that can easily be spotted on the runaways of Richard Quinn or on Kim Kardashian when she made her Met Gala debut in 2013 with a Givenchy roses dress.

The Freud portrait was a another turning point for Bowery.

“It changed Leigh’s life and introduced a whole another world. He was always trying to learn and find new things out,” says Tilley.

Bowery’s spirit remains an integral part of London’s buzz, which in recent years has dwindled due to everything from political instability to the high cost of living in the British capital. His creations went against the grain 30 years ago, but he remains a part of London’s queer roots and creative foundation.

The exhibition at the Tate Modern is a reminder of his color and presence. “A lot of people associate him with fashion or club culture, or just see him as just maybe one note, but he was someone who questioned sexuality and explored the body and taboo ideas that society [is so afraid to],” says Moran.

He was the life of the city, says Tilley. “I always say to people, ‘go out, go to nightclubs, get drunk and meet people.’ That is how I met all my friends and all the things that happened in my life is because of that,” she adds.

Moran and Tilley both hope that the exhibition will help reincarnate some of that fearless attitude the city once had.