# Leigh Bowery! review – a colossal display of shapeshifting outrageousness and originality

**Life was a guise to the performance artist Leigh Bowery (1961-94). His looks were so outlandish, his costumes so teemingly various, they jam every inch of this huge retrospective. He is a gilded boy-god, a Christmas pudding on legs, a prosthetised Venus of Willendorf. He is a leather-clad dame in a zipped-up mask or a Regency dandy in pistachio pantaloons, their orange polka dots spreading upwards all over his face.**





Photograph: © Fergus Greer. Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery




This retrospective grows harsher, darker. The shapes become more bulbous, the forms more exaggerated. Some of the images are sinister as well as ugly.

Even in his civvies, Bowery liked to wear wigs, ill-fitting jumpers and a strip of tape to yank one eyebrow awry. He wanted, he said, to be like that “weirdo in the street that you tell your mum about”.

But look at his denim jacket fluttering with gold feathers, which turn out to be nothing more than thousands of blond hairpins, or his beard of bristling pegs. Or the multicoloured ribbons wound around his naked body like shining reels at John Lewis. Make yourself new every day.

This is what stuns, in the end – this extreme originality. No matter what body you were born with, or how shocking you might appear to others, Bowery’s work is a lesson in looking – and living – like nobody else.

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