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Leigh Bowery! review – a colossal display of shapeshifting outrageousness and originality
The late Australian performance artist’s huge retrospective is packed with outlandish costumes, stylish photographs, emotive writing and evocative video footage, but what is most striking is his singular artistic vision
Courtesy Michael Hoppen GalleryHe fills the frame every time, in period photographs and videos, an enormous Australian with a shaved head and powerful calves, standing 6ft 3in and higher in towering platform soles painted scarlet or silver. Here is his famous dalmatian dress and mask, the vast pinstripe suit caked with sequins he wore to Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World, the unitard he used to conceal his wife, Nicola, during the “birthing performances”, when she would emerge from between his legs. But Bowery’s body is not just a complex instrument of self-portraiture; it becomes a living sculpture: a majestic column, a strutting vector with a pompom for a head, at one point so completely concealed in white Lycra that the spreadeagled form no longer appears human at all.
Or read this on The Guardian
