With the Australian artist Leigh Bowery (1961-1994), this catalog devotes itself to one of the most colourful border crossers of the London club, fashion, and art scene of the 1980s and 1990s. Bowery made his sexuality a means of aesthetic expression, and he consciously used his own body in his excessive abundance as an artistic media. His costumes, masquerades, and travesties investigate the concepts of fashion and the body at the boundaries to the most diverse social fields. Bowery employs his own physical bulkiness as the starting point of an extroverted body cult in which the concepts of ugliness and beauty, social standardisation and border crossings intersect. The result was an art figure which influenced in various areas. Bowery thus inspired Lucian Freud to one of his most fascinating nude paintings.He was discovered by the London art dealer Anthony d’Offay in 1988 and this was the start of a cooperation with the Photographer Fergus Greer who would accompany him until his early death in 1994 resulting from an HIV infection.

Editor: Kunstverein Hannover, René Zechlin, Ute Stuffer
Artists: Leigh Bowery

Softcover
24 x 27 cm
136 pages
151 color ills.
German/English
available
ISBN 978-3-86828-033-3
28 Euro
2008