Fiontán Moran, the co-curator of a new exhibition dedicated to Leigh Bowery (1961-94) at Tate Modern, thinks that a show about the legendary, late Australian artist and club king is long overdue. “It has been 30 years since Bowery’s passing and while his presence can be seen in many aspects of art and visual culture, there has been no major exhibition dedicated to his work in the UK,” Moran says.
The show will open with Bowery’s arrival in London from Australia in 1980, progressing to his emergence in the city’s 1980s club scene—with the launch of the Taboo club off Leicester Square in 1985—and explosive entry into the dance and art worlds of the decade before his death from an Aids-related illness in 1994.
Bowery’s provocative and daring style will be set against different backdrops; the exhibition is loosely chronological with each room based around a site—home, stage, street or club—as a way to consider Bowery’s practice in relation to the spaces in which his works were originally seen and experienced, Moran says.
Crucially, the exhibition will focus on Bowery’s collaborations with the likes of the choreographer Michael Clark, the conceptual artist Stephen Willats and the painter Lucian Freud. Portraits by photographers including Nick Knight and Charles Atlas will show how Bowery was able to use his body as a form of “contemporary Surrealism, reimagining himself as an alien-like creature”, Moran says.
His work embodies a camp and postmodern sensibility where nothing is too much, and meaning is continually in flux
Fiontán Moran, curator
“I think what is interesting about Bowery is that nothing was off-limits. He continually sought to push the boundaries of the body and modes of performance,” Moran says. “His work embodies a camp and postmodern sensibility where nothing is too much, and meaning is continually in flux. This has had an influence on many artists and designers who seek to reimagine the norms of the body, and the ways it can be used to communicate different ideas that push against societal conventions.”
The show will highlight how life became art for Bowery, who demonstrated that performance can take place in contexts outside of the art world, melding into everyday existence. Bowery often enjoyed doing impromptu performances on the street for passers-by. “He was always performing on some level, whether it be in a club, or on the stage in Michael Clark’s productions, and then in his collaborations with photographers like Fergus Greer or Charles Atlas,” Moran says.
In the flesh: Lucian Freud’s 1992 portrait Nude with Leg Up (Leigh Bowery) © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2024/Bridgeman Images
The most “conventional” performance was his exhibition at London’s Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1988 where he wore a series of “looks” over five days and posed in front of a two-way mirror, so that people could see him but he could only see his reflection. The audience’s responses to the event are captured in the video What’s Your Reaction to the Show? (1988) by Dick Jewell.
The Tate show has been organised in collaboration with Nicola Rainbird, Bowery’s wife and owner of his estate, which provided access to rare archival documents and photographs. “The only costumes not from the estate are the Blitz Levi’s jacket from the Victoria and Albert Museum and a wing-harness from a private collection, which was originally made for Michael Clark’s [1986 dance piece] No Fire Escape in Hell,” Moran says.
Public unveiling
Many of the works have not been seen in the UK before. “We have a selection of ‘exquisite corpse’ drawings that Bowery did with his friend Richard Torry and other friends, some of which have never been shown publicly,” Moran adds.
A small painting of Bowery by Lucian Freud, drawn from a private collection, will also be on show for the first time. Bowery is probably best known in the art world as being Freud’s muse. “They both shared a fascination with the body and resisted the idea of living a conventional life,” Moran says. “This is something that Bowery remarked upon, once telling an interviewer that Freud’s work is ‘full of tension’, and that, like him, ‘he is interested in the underbelly of things’.” The curatorial team hopes that bringing their works together, including Freud’s Leigh Bowery (1991) and Nude with Leg Up (Leigh Bowery) (1992), will spark new theories about their practices.
It seems that Bowery’s apparent ambition to show at Tate has finally come to fruition. “[The pop star] Boy George said to me that Leigh would have loved the fact that his work is being appreciated in an art museum rather than [him] solely being considered a fashion designer,” Moran says, “which speaks to the multitude of ways through which he sought to create, and his resistance to any form of categorisation.”
• Leigh Bowery!, Tate Modern, London, 27 February-31 August
