Sydney continues to set extraordinarily high standards for 2023 World Pride as each day we keep discovering even more must-see/must-do events. Today it’s the National Portrait Gallery of Australia in Canberra who are celebrating Pride by sharing brilliant, beautiful, and bold portraits featuring LGBTQIA+ sitters from their collection, like the one above of Leigh Bowery (he/him).
Leigh was a prominent London-based designer, singer, club promoter and performance artist whose heyday was in the late-80s to early-90s. While Leigh’s extravagance, explicit performance art, and in-your-face attitude are what he’s remembered by, his art also held subtle layers of nuance and activism. For example, he would often paint dots on his face to make a statement about the prominence of Kaposi’s sarcoma amongst AIDS sufferers in the 1980s. His work also touched on fewer taboo topics, such as body image and various illnesses outside of HIV/AIDS. At the age of 33, in 1994, Leigh died of complications from AIDS. Yet, his legacy can still be seen across fashion, and art and peppered throughout mainstream culture.
Here are a few of Queerguru's favorites from the Exhibit
Ross Watson’s portrait of Mitcham Matthew the first out gay athlete to win an individual Olympic gold medal is from Classic de Novo, a series of paintings in which sitters are inserted into paintings by artists such as Caravaggio, Vermeer and Jacob van Ruisdael. Mitcham appears in the series twice: in a reworking of Caravaggio’s famous Boy with a basket of fruit; and in this variation on Sebastiano Ricci’s The fall of Phaeton, in which Phaeton, son of the sun-God Helios, tumbles from his father’s chariot.
Will Huxley grew up in the suburbs of Perth, and Garrett Huxley was raised on the Gold Coast. After university, where they both studied photography – Will at Edith Cowan University and Garrett at the Queensland College of Art – the artists gravitated to Melbourne where they met in 2006. Garrett and Will found that they had much in common: not least their individual experiences growing up queer in traditional suburban Australia, and their passions for art and creativity. The pair soon began to collaborate as The Huxleys, combining their separate practices of photography, filmmaking and costume design, with performance as a key element. Inspired by the attention-grabbing and the outrageous, the artists embrace the glamourous, the absurd and the provocative and in doing so challenge convention; the Huxleys persuade their audience to consider notions of gender, social mores and non-conformity. The artists continue to be in demand across the country and internationally.
David McAllister AC (b. 1963) and Wesley Enoch AM (b. 1969) have been together since 2007, but spent over a decade living in separate cities. McAllister was the Australian Ballet’s artistic director and lived in Melbourne; Enoch was in either Sydney or Brisbane, as the director of the Sydney Festival, and as the director of the Queensland Theatre Company before that. But they maintained a policy of phoning one another daily, and of never going more than three weeks without seeing each other – somewhere. Peter Brew-Bevan wanted his portrait of them to capture this together-but-apart aspect of their relationship, while at the same time telling of ‘their very strong bond and love for each other’.
Ian Thorpe AM (b. 1982) is one of Australia’s most successful Olympians. He started swimming at age five and, at fifteen, was the youngest world champion in history. His first Olympic campaign, in Sydney, resulted in three gold and two silver medals and three world records. Thorpe’s haul for 2001 and 2002 included wins in six events at the World Championships; six gold medals at the Manchester Commonwealth Games; and another world record. In claiming the 400m freestyle world title in 2003, he became the first swimmer to win the same event at three consecutive world championships.
National Portrait Gallery King Edward Terrace, Canberra, ACT, Australia
