Tate Modern this week opened a vast exhibition exploring the life and work of the maverick Australian-born performance artist, fashion designer and self-styled “club monster”, Leigh Bowery, as well as the variety of cultural figures in his orbit in London.
Fergus Greer, Leigh Bowery Session 7, Look 37 (June 1994) © Fergus Greer. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery
It coincides with other related London shows: one analysing the fashion work of Bowery and his collaborators and peers at the Fashion and Textile Museum, and another at the National Portrait Gallery about the style and culture magazine The Face, which emerged around the same time as Bowery set foot in the UK capital in the early 1980s. Ben Luke reviews the shows with Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent.
As US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are due to meet, Ukraine’s cultural sector continues to show resilience
Photos: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons
Three years on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and amid fraught international diplomacy following the US’s abrupt shift in approach to the war under President Trump, we speak to Sophia Kishkovsky, our international correspondent who has widely reported on Russia and Ukraine, about how Ukraine’s art world is responding to this new era.
Max Beckmann, Women’s Bath (1919)
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / André van Linn // Frauenbad, 1919 © https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
And this episode’s Work of the Week is actually a pair of works made more than 400 years apart called The Women’s Bath. The first is a woodcut based on a drawing by Albrecht Dürer from around 1500; the second a painting responding to it, made by the German artist Max Beckmann in 1919.
Sebald Beham, The Women's Bath (first half of the 16th century)
Photo: Andreas Harvik/Børre Høstland
They feature in an exhibition opening this week at the National Museum in Oslo, Gothic Modern: From Darkness to Light. Cynthia Osiecki, a curator at the museum, tells us more.
- Leigh Bowery!, Tate Modern, until 31 August; Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London, Fashion and Textile Museum, London, until 9 March; The Face Magazine: Culture Shift, National Portrait Gallery, London, until 18 May
- Gothic Modern: From Darkness to Light, National Museum, Oslo, 28 February-15 June.