On 27 February, the Tate Modern will open an exhibition on legendary club-goer and avant-garde performance artist, Leigh Bowery. The exhibition will "embrace the clashing, chaos, messiness of club culture in the 1980s and early 1990s." 

A disruptor, a visionary, a shape-shifting butterfly, Leigh Bowery is best known for his extraordinary impact on British fashion, art and music in the late twentieth century. 

Born in 1961, Bowery’s upbringing in Melbourne couldn’t be more different from the life and character he would go on to forge. His childhood was one of suburban conservative politics, hairdressing competitions and the Salvation Army Church. As the sixties rolled on, a teenage Bowery dreamed of moving to London and becoming a fashion designer. 

From Sunshine, Australia, a world of concrete sunburns and sensible suburban cars, to London in 1980. Fleeing a culture of moral knee snapping and liturgical threats, Bowery found himself in a thrilling new world with derelict shipyards and ratty docklands, a thriving and provocative underground club scene, and kids flocking to the capital to be freed from the chains of conformist middle Britain, finding ultimate escape in the alternative nightlife that London had to offer. 

In 1985, Bowery debuted the infamous nightclub Taboo in Leicester Square. Fashion and costume were a means of transformation at Taboo, showcasing the corporeal to the ethereal, the impermanent to the effervescent. Bowery’s legendary performances at Taboo made him not a man, but an icon. 

Tying together many dynamic elements of performance, Bowery defied easy categorisation. There was a new outfit every night. He appeared as a king of kings, or as a naughty schoolgirl, defacing his private school uniform with safety pins and lines from Unfinished Sympathy. Hundreds of Bowery’s outfits paraded through Taboo, prowling through the hall of mirrors, towering like disco balls in the periphery. A monolith in polka dot tights emerging onto a slick and hungry dance floor. 

This chameleon quality, however, presented initial challenges when capturing and transposing Bowery’s outlandish club performances to the museum environment.

Assistant Curator of the exhibition Jess Baxter recalls what first drew her to Bowery: “The way he acted in his clothes was, for me, as interesting as the clothes themselves. Lies could tumble from his lips with unswerving confidence, his tarty middle-class English accent deliberately masking his Australian background. He literally fashioned an idea of himself and became it. He willed it into existence—I found it peculiar, fascinating and altogether inspiring.”  Baxter explains, “It became clear as we were forming the exhibition’s narrative that you can view Bowery’s practice through the space he was in: the home, the club, the stage and the street. So the exhibition is loosely chronological and formed around those sites.” 

Bowery’s outrageous attitude broke through the boundaries of art, fashion and performance. His modus operandi was to shock and to enchant. Particularly notorious were his ‘birth’ performances, in which he appeared on stage and gave ‘birth’ to Nicola Bowery Rainbird, who spent the first half of the performance under Bowery’s costume, strapped upside down to his chest, an event that would influence designers like Rick Owens at his Spring 2016 runway show. In 1988, Bowery performed in a weeklong residency at the Anthony D’Offay Gallery, where he donned outrageous costumes and posed in front of a one-way mirror for an audience of museum-goers. Michael Bracewell wrote on Bowery’s performance for Frieze magazine that he was “having the last laugh at the expense of formal art.” Laughter served an obscure and liberating function for the artist. He was not concerned with adhering to the rules and traditions of an over-intellectualised and vainglorious industry. He was a bulldozer and a trailblazer, cutting through the meaning of institutionalised art. He transgressed and created something entirely his own. Bowery’s, however, was a mythology created by many hands.

Jess Baxter notes that it was “absolutely essential for us to centre the act of collaboration in the exhibition [for] he wasn’t working in a vacuum.” In collaboration with dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, Bowery designed movement-hindering costumes for I Am Curious, Orange (1988), wore a chainsaw in No Fire Escape in Hell (1986) and made lemons out of dancers to the soundtrack of Mark E. Smith’s The Fall. He was a muse and collaborator, working with artists such as John Maybury, Charles Atlas and Cerith Wyn Evans, whose films will be screened in the exhibition. Nicola Bowery Rainbird and Mr Pearl, who co-designed many of his looks, are also included. 

Another notable collaboration highlighted in the exhibition is with artist Lucian Freud. Bowery sat for Freud over a four-year period from 1988 to 1992. The paintings produced in this time provide a stark contrast to the overproduced, highly curated image Bowery had flaunted in the underground club scene. Freud elicits a stripped-down intimacy in these portraits of Bowery. He appears almost childlike in the portrait Leigh Bowery, 1991, with his head resting on his shoulder, eyes closed, as angelic as one of François Bucher’s Putti. Or as a ginormous, standing nude in Leigh Under the Skylight, 1994, captured as a fleshy Michelangelo’s David by Freud’s omniscient brush. These portraits could not be more different from the dolled-up decadence of Bowery’s performances at Taboo or Heaven or Camden Palace. Once more, he evades being pinned down and defined under any other claustrophobic identity.

Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard wrote, “Once you label me, you negate me.” Bowery embodied this joyful and anarchic commitment to self-liberation. He roguishly refused to live a singular and monochromatic existence until his death on 31st December, 1994, at the age of 33. Over thirty years later, Bowery’s incredible influence is still being felt. He was a renegade, a Babylonian supermodel, Freud’s sleeping beauty and a total artist in every sense of the word.  “The exhibition will spark conversations about the history of drag, the body, and identity, allowing people to step into the endlessly creative mind of Leigh Bowery,” Baxter reveals. “Hopefully people come away from the exhibition with a sense of exhilaration, joy, amazement, and a deep desire to go clubbing.” 

The exhibition Leigh Bowery! is organised by the Tate Modern in collaboration with Nicola Rainbird, Director and Owner of the Estate of Leigh Bowery, and will run from 27 February until 31 August 2025.