LEIGH BOWERY: PROFILE.

A fashion jester on a gargantuan scale, Leigh Bowery stretched every sartorial excess. But only by stripping off completely to become one of Lucian Freud's most charismatic subjects, did this transvestite-performing artist take his rightful place in the cultural canon.

Young Leigh was horrified by appearance and enjoyed a gift for design. His fashion statements soon raised many an eyebrow in his hometown of Sunshine, near Melbourne.

He dropped out of college and moved to London in 1980, making only one rule, to "wear makeup every day". He often left the house dressed in platform shoes, a latex body stocking and a pig's mask, the look topped off neatly by a police helmet. Bowery boasted as many piercings as sequins, and what started as an instinct to show off soon became an occupation.

As well as selling clothes, Bowery was a feted designer for Michael Clark's ballet company. His outrageous appearance and strong personality made him a natural host of the infamous club West End club Taboo, so named because "nothing there was".

When he wasn't being a one-man art installation at a friend's gallery, he was giving notorious live performances. With his art-rock band Minty, he could shock a weary audience by "giving birth" on stage to one of his friends. At seven feet tall, Leigh Bowery was a walking, talking objet d'art.

He was a great proponent of disguise, yet it was ultimately Lucian Freud's unmasking of this masked reveler that ensured his lasting credibility. After years of tripping over high heels on dance floors, Bowery revealed his power, stillness and serenity under the auspices of Freud's brush.

He was undoubtedly a complicated character. When he wasn't decorated to the eyeballs for an evening assault on town, Bowery dressed almost ascetically. In the last year of his life, this veteran of the international gay cruising scene married a close female friend. And although he appeared savagely inhibited throughout his career, for six years he kept the secret of his HIV status almost entirely to himself.

Lucian Freud is our most celebrated depicter of personal contradiction, so it is fitting that his huge canvases revealed Bowery in all his vulnerable, naked humanity. And for all the time and effort the performer invested in concealing himself behind sequins and feathers, it was of Leigh Bowery's undecorated form that Freud recalled, "I found him perfectly beautiful."