Leigh Bowery! Tate Modern Celebrates a Club-Scene Legend

Few figures blurred the line between art, fashion and performance like Leigh Bowery. Tate Modern's 2025 exhibition 'Leigh Bowery!' celebrated the Australian-born provocateur who erupted from London's 1980s club scene to become a muse, designer and living artwork.

The show gathered his extravagant 'Looks' — grotesque, glamorous, gravity-defying — alongside his collaborations with the choreographer Michael Clark, photographers like Fergus Greer and Nick Knight, and the painter Lucian Freud, who immortalised Bowery's body on canvas.

Decades after his death in 1994, his fearless self-invention still echoes through the work of Alexander McQueen, Lady Gaga and a generation of artists who treat identity as their medium.

Image: “Super moon over City of London from Tate Modern 2018-01-31 4” — Colin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.