LEIGH BOWERY
with Sue Tilley

Tuesday 26th May 2015 - This talk has now sold out..
Doors open at 6:30 pm, Talk commences at 7:00 pm

Leigh Bowery was one of the most controversial and avant-garde performers of his generation. In this talk, author Sue Tilley, one of Bowery’s closest friends, lays bare the extravagant life of the trendsetting entertainer. From Bowery’s groundbreaking costumes and performance art, to his notoriety in London’s 1980s nightclub culture, to his role as a favored model for painter Lucian Freud, Tilley will offer an insight into the outrageous world of 1980s modern art and the man who came to embody it.

Sue Tilley
Along with being one of Bowery's best friends, Sue Tilley is one of the most recognisable muses in modern British art. She modelled for Lucian Freud in the early 1990s, a seminal period of the artist's career and one of his portraits of her entitled "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" sold for a record £17.2 million, the highest price paid for a painting by a living artist. She is now an artist and a writer and continues to work four days per week at the Westminster Job Centre.

"Compulsive and heartfelt. All elegies should resonate like this." - Esquire

"A touching tribute of friendship, written with wit, verve and considerable charm." - The Telegraph

Tickets £20 including a glass of prosecco. Please click here to buy.

2015 DATES AT THE CAFE ROYAL

28th May 2015
Sue Tilley on Leigh Bowery

9th June 2015
Suits, Sex and Savile Row with Ian Kelly

14th July 2015
Kate Bethune on Alexander McQueen

In 1863, a French wine merchant called Daniel Nicholas Thévenon and his wife arrived in England in a bid to escape the clutches of creditors in Paris. So began a story that grew out of bankruptcy and culminated in the creation of Regent Street’s Café Royal: a truly remarkable and original establishment with what was considered at one point to have the greatest wine cellar in the world and was reputed for its excellent hospitality, dining and entertainment. 

Frequented by writers and artists such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, the conversations, inspirations and discussions at ‘The Café’ were profound. Arthur Conan Doyle, H G Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, W B Yeats, Walter Sickert and James McNeill Whistler were all patrons. Distinguished figures such as Winston Churchill, Augustus John, D H Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Noël Coward, Jacob Epstein and Graham Greene were also often seen.