Leigh Bowery Arrives at Tate Modern, Without Labels

A new exhibition about the indefinable performer and designer won’t pigeonhole him, though it will bring his work to a much broader audience.

“If you label me, you negate me,” the performance artist and fashion designer Leigh Bowery said in 1993, one year before his death at age 33.

Maybe it is this resistance to easy categorization that has meant Bowery never quite became a household name. His cultural influence, though, is beyond question: His provocative performances led him to work with artists including Lucian Freud and Marina Abramovic. His extreme fashions are still referenced on runways, by designers including Rick Owens and John Galliano. And his status as a queer culture icon is cemented by regular invocations at L.G.B.T.Q. club nights and on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

But during his short, colorful and often shocking life, nobody knew what box to put Bowery in. Three decades after his death, they still don’t.

A new exhibition called “Leigh Bowery!” at Tate Modern in London will bring his work to a much broader audience. The show, which opens Feb. 27 and runs through Aug. 31, charts Bowery’s journey from suburban Australia to the heart of London’s alternative gay club scene in the ’80s, and his transformation into a figure that Boy George once described as “modern art on legs.”

George later went on to play Bowery in the 2003 Broadway run of the biographical musical “Taboo,” for which George also wrote the lyrics. The musical is named after an infamous club night that Bowery hosted, which opened in 1985 on a dingy corner of London’s Leicester Square.