Leigh Bowery exhibition reviews: what the critics say
- maxwell museums
- Mar 30
- 3 min read
The Leigh Bowery exhibition at Tate Modern has burst onto the scene in a riot of colour and outlandish swagger. And broadly, the reviews suggest that the show is flawed, but is well worth a visit.
Leigh Bowery! — which runs at the London gallery until the end of August 2025 — celebrates the short life but remarkable legacy of the boundary-pushing artist, performer, model, designer, TV personality, club promoter and musician.
For the first time, Tate Modern have been able to bring together Bowery’s outlandish and dazzling costumes alongside painting, photography and videos to explore how he changed art, fashion and popular culture forever.
And the art critics seem to agree on two things. That this is a huge — or perhaps, too huge — exhibition, and that it really is no ordinary show. “Unhinged” is how one critic described it.
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Leigh Bowery reviews say it’s a flawed riot
This “nine part exhibition,” Joe Bromley says, “is an all-out riot, blasting through the searing highs and crashing comedowns of the period.”
In his four-star review for the Evening Standard, he says that “for the many that will not have come into contact with Bowery, it is a rich offering that basks in the unbounded glory of his extraordinary costumes” and vast other quantities paraphernalia from his life.
He thinks “visitors will be hard pushed not to leave without feeling a burning desire to be more individual and daring, too.”
Bromely doesn’t think the exhibition is perfect however. “Perhaps the greatest flaw,” he writes, is where the show’s narrative begins. Visitors meet Bowery after he has left Australia as a 19-year-old. “There is no mention of his accountant father, mother who worked at Salvation Army, nor any sense of what drove Bowery to become the person he did — other than the fact ‘he’s bored.’”
The Spectator’s Digby Warde-Aldam also really enjoyed it, calling the show “a blast, [and] an often context-defying sensory overload of sound, vision and glitter.”
Warde-Aldam was particularly taken with the “borderline-unhinged exhibition design.”
“One gallery is wrapped in the home-made Star Trek wallpaper with which Bowery decorated his Stepney council flat, another in mirrored polka dots.” The Spectator critic thinks it “all adds to the sense that the Tate is responding to an apparent public demand for immersive cultural ‘experiences’, and actually excusing itself rather well.”
Like Bromley, Warde-Aldam’s spots the show’s flaws. “The actual exhibits feel like an afterthought” and “there’s not much in the way of narrative development” he says.
Still, he ultimately concludes that Tate’s exhibition is “a picture of a particular, outlandish cultural moment” that “is evocative and entertaining – a triumph of style over substance.”
The Telegraph’s Alastair Sooke agreed that the substance of the show is lacking. “While I relished many aspects of the fresh, invigorating curation” Sooke writes in his three-star review, “the exhibition feels by the end repetitive and thin.”
Sooke thinks “there’s an over-reliance on ephemera (flyers, brochures, postcards), as well as scrappy and dingy, second-tier artworks by Bowery’s less-talented contemporaries.”
He concludes that “ironically, given [Bowery’s] uncontainable exuberance, the show could have been tighter, and presented in half the space.”
The scale of the show was also picked up by Adrian Searle. His Guardian review calls it “overstretched.” He also noted that one humorous interview Bowery did in his lifetime is not in the exhibition, but “just about everything else Bowery did, as well as everyone he met, danced and drank with, everyone he hung out with, insulted and argued with, is.”
Searle also thinks Tate’s publicity material — that calls Bowery ‘one of the most fearless and original artists of the 20th century’ — is “beyond hyperbole and misses the point of Bowery’s excess and his purpose.” He thinks Tate Modern is not the venue for the show, and that it’s the V&A where it “feels it more rightly belongs.”
Ultimately, the critics’ consensus seems to be summed up by Nancy Durrant writing in the Times. In her own four-star review she calls the exhibition “fascinating, and joyfully displayed” but that “there’s nothing complex to grasp here.”
Leigh Bowery! is "just a well-thought-out celebration of a highly influential, boundary-pushing cultural icon.”
Leigh Bowery! runs at Tate Modern in London until 31 August 2025.
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