Leigh Bowery

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Leigh Bowery (born March 26, 1961 in Sunshine near Melbourne , Australia ; † December 31, 1994 or January 1, 1995 in London ) was an Australian performance artist , fashion designer , nightclub operator and model . Bowery was one of the most inspiring figures on the London and New York fashion and nightclub scene in the 1980s and 1990s. His extravagant and bizarre costumes, called "looks", influenced numerous later designers, artists and musicians. Bowery's impact on performance art and pop culture extends to the present day.

Life

Bowery was born in Sunshine, a suburb of Melbourne . He himself felt that his homeland was a cultural wasteland in which he did not feel comfortable. He was considered a multi-talented child. As a teenager he discovered the London New Romantics for himself and preferred to read style magazines such as iD . After high school in Melbourne, he moved to London around 1980 to become a fashion designer. His bizarre outfits, which he himself called “looks” and which he presented in often exhibitionistic , gender identity- dissolving performances with a mixture of music and dance, quickly made him known in the London subculture. He moved in with the artists Trojan (Guy Barnes) and David Walls, two big names in the London scene, who wore his self-made shrill creations in the trendy nightclubs. Trojan and Bowery briefly became lovers while Walls left the shared apartment.

Initially ignored by the general public, Bowery organized numerous fashion shows from the mid-1980s, for example at the London ICA , Camden Palace , as well as in New York and Tokyo. He designed costumes and stage outfits a. a. for David Bowie , Boy George , The Fall or the Michael Clark Company. In the midst of the conservative Thatcher era , Bowery opened the Taboo discotheque in January 1985, which appealed to a polysexual audience. The club was considered the London counterpart to the legendary New York Studio 54 , but attracted a much more extreme audience.

In 1988 Bowery contracted HIV . In May 1993 he married his long-time girlfriend Nicola Bateman, a well-known nude model by Lucian Freud . Leigh Bowery died on New Year's Eve 1994 of complications from AIDS in Middlesex Hospital, London .

Exhibitions

literature

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ XTRAVAGANZA Staging Leigh Bowery. (No longer available online.) Kunsthalle Wien, archived from the original on February 7, 2013 ; Retrieved December 16, 2012 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kunsthallewien.at
personal data
SURNAME Bowery, Leigh
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian performance artist, fashion designer, model and nightclub operator
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1961
PLACE OF BIRTH Sunshine near Melbourne , Australia
DATE OF DEATH December 31, 1994
Place of death London