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.
He 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. Even though he is long gone, a sense of his colossal presence is apparent from the opening gallery, where a rack of Bowery’s earliest costumes gives an immediate sense of his size.
