Leigh Bowery revisited – 2023

Collage on painted board with cut-out photograph and applied red dots which incorporate the Frame.  H40 x W48.5 cm

The iconic performance artist Leigh Bowery assuming one of his performance persona’s – a full-on all-over polka-dot pattern, is depicted together with the negative cut-out of his photographed environment. The emotional effect of this cut-out negative is the presence of his spectre, which blends into the background.

His heavily made-up, almost-measled positive figure is resituated on the far right, balancing on an inflated red dot-within-a-dot. Looking back into the pre-painted, now recycled picture plane, he holds the hand of a fugitively-painted small figure in also in red.

The polka-dotted frame is, by extension, part of the Bowery fantasy- filled fairy tale-like world.