Leigh Bowery!

Performance artist, fashion icon, model, musician, club promoter, muse – Leigh Bowery packed a lot in before his death in 1994 from AIDS at the age of 33. He arrived in London from his home city of Melbourne in 1980, only 19 years old, and made a huge mark on the counterculture of the capital, setting up the avant-garde Taboo club in Leicester Square in 1985, forming a band, Minty, and collaborating with artists including Michael Clark, Lucian Freud, Stephen Willats and others. Bowery continually reimagined his image and, in doing so, tested the limits of performance art, fashion design and gender norms in a way that has influenced figures from Vivienne Westwood to Alexander McQueen and Boy George to Lady Gaga. This exhibition at Tate Modern explores his lasting influence on the art world and testifies to the remarkable variety of looks Bowery adopted – painted entirely yellow in a photograph taken by Nick Knight in 1987; dancing manically against a technicolour background in John Maybury’s film Read Only Memory (1989); clad in head-to-toe black latex and snapped by Fergus Greer in 1994 – and goes far beyond the familiar portraits of him that Freud painted in the ’90s (27 February–31 August).

Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary
Find out more from the Tate’s website