‘A living, breathing work of art’: Leigh Bowery by those who knew him best

The performance artist shocked 1980s London with his surreal outfits, outlandish lifestyle and collaborations with Lucian Freud, dancer Michael Clark and others. As a major exhibition opens at Tate Modern, family and friends talk about Bowery’s larger-than-life legacy. In October 1980, 19 year-old Leigh Bowery arrived in London from the small Australian town of Sunshine in suburban Melbourne. He brought with him a single suitcase and a portable sewing machine. A few months later, he spent his first Christmas away from home in a rented bedsit feeling depressed and lonely. On 31 December, he attempted to raise his spirits by writing down his new year resolutions:.

1. Get weight down to 12 stone. 2. Learn as much as possible. 3. Become established in the world of art, fashion or literature. 4. Wear makeup every day. He failed miserably to keep the first resolution despite completing several crash diets. “As soon as they were over, he would stuff his face with about 10 burgers, which undid his good work.” his close friend Sue Tilley recalls in her fly-on-the-wall, gossip-drenched book, Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon.

He set about the second fitfully and the fourth with often extravagant application, but it was the third that now seems most indicative of his bigger ambition, which was to become famous at all costs. He pursued it in spectacular fashion throughout the 1980s and into the early 90s – posing, performing, modelling, working as an art director on promo videos for bands including Massive Attack. During that time, he also collaborated with the dancer Michael Clark, formed a transgressive pop group, Minty, and became a nude model for the portrait painter Lucian Freud.

Bowery’s greatest achievement, however, was to transform himself into a living, breathing work of art in a sustained process of continuous sartorial self-reinvention that lasted right up until his death in 1994 at the age of 33. Throughout, he created a succession of elaborate looks that included decorating his cherubic face with polka dots, dripping brightly coloured paint over his gleaming bald head, encasing his body in thick foam costumes that exaggerated his bigness, squeezing into tightly bound basques and covering his entire body, including his face, with dazzlingly patterned material. One of his creative collaborators, corset maker Mr Pearl, described the latter outfit, which was topped with a military style helmet, as “Shelley Winters if she belonged to the Gestapo”.

The fame that Bowery sought in his lifetime was fleeting and cultish, not least because the extravagant alter ego he created was too strange and threatening to ever cross over in the manner of other contemporary gender-mischievous 80s celebrities such as Boy George or Marilyn. On the rare occasions that Bowery did manage to gatecrash the mainstream, usually on TV chatshows, his wilfully freakish presence shocked and appalled studio audiences in equal measure. Instead, the nightclub became his catwalk and gallery. “Before he called himself an artist, he already was one,” says his friend, the film-maker John Maybury. “He had an artist’s obsessive drive to create and constantly reinvent himself.” Another friend, Tony Marnoch, now more famously known on the global club scene as DJ Fat Tony, says: “He created a masterpiece – himself. It allowed him to cover up all his cracks and bruises.”.

Today, 30 years after his death, Bowery remains on the margins, but his influence is palpable everywhere, from the high camp melodrama of Ru Paul’s Drag Race to the extravagant costumes worn by modern pop stars including Lady Gaga. Next month, though, Bowery himself will make headlines once again in a way that even he may have found surprising. At Tate Modern, an exhibition entitled Leigh Bowery! will celebrate his art, life and legacy in a series of themed rooms – the home, the club, the stage, the gallery – that will explore his myriad self-styled roles and singular presence.

It is a belated recognition of his enduring influence on the increasingly porous worlds of art, pop and fashion, but also, as curator, Fiontán Moran, says, a moment to reappraise him as a serious artist. “Just having Leigh Bowery’s work in Tate Modern rather than a fashion or design museum is a way of reimagining him. And, while fashion design is a major part of his legacy, the exhibition will look at his life as one never-ending performance that explored the body and all the things that can be done with it. That groundbreaking idea is central to everything he did, and everything he made.”.

In its size and elaborate adornment, Bowery’s body mirrored his ambition and his personality, loudly and unapologetically signalling his otherness, whether on the dancefloors of London’s gay clubs or on his regular, head-turning trips to his local supermarket. To encounter him unexpectedly, as I once did in the semi-deserted streets of early hours Soho, emerging out of a side alley on Brewer Street, was to be momentarily taken aback. He looked arrestingly strange, his size and manchild features, alongside his body-hugging costume, lending him an unsettling aspect that seemed to have more in common with the darkly unconscious imaginings of surrealism than the high-camp flamboyance of drag.