Tate Modern exhibition: 27 February - 2 September 2025
A towering and luminous monograph on the boundary-pushing career of artist, performer, model, TV personality, club promoter, fashion designer and musician, Leigh Bowery.

Leigh Bowery (1961-1994) used performance to explore questions around the politics of the body, and its use as both material and a site of transformation. He was also fascinated by the subversive potential of costume as sculpture.

Published to accompany a major exhibition, Leigh Bowery features over two hundred images by and of the artist - spanning an eclectic and dynamic career which included fashion photography, club polaroids, film stills, paintings, postcards, and ephemera. In addition to Bowery's own works, the book also includes paintings of the artist by Lucian Freud, and works made with and about Bowery by Stephen Willats and Trojan Barnes, among others. A visual inventory of all of Bowery's costumes, held by the artist's estate, has been newly photographed - published here for the first time.

Details

ISBN13: 9781849769587
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 240
Edition:
Publication Date: 30 Jun 2025
Publisher: Tate Publishing
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 35(H)x23(L)
Weight (gm):

Author Biography

Fiontán Moran  is Curator, International Art at Tate Modern. Jess Baxter is Assistant Curator of International Art at Tate Modern. Catherine Wood is Director of Programme at Tate Modern, and curator of contemporary art and performance. At Tate she has co-curated numerous exhibitions including The World as a Stage (2007), Pop Life (2010) and A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance (2012), as well as co-directing the opening programme for the Tate Tanks in 2012 titled, Art in Action. She has programmed numerous performance works at Tate since 2003, including works by Mark Leckey, Joan Jonas, Guy de Cointet, Jiri Kovanda and Sturtevant, and initiated the online project, Performance Room in 2011. Wood is author of Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle (2007, Afterall/MIT Press). A regular contributor to Afterall, Artforum and Mousse magazines, she has also written numerous catalogue essays, recently on Joachim Koester, Piotr Uklanski and Sung Hwan Kim.

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