LA MOSTRA DI DAVID BOWIE A LONDRA

David Bowie is, Victoria and Albert Museum: 23 March-11 August

‘David Bowie is’, the title of the exhibition at the V&A, is both mysterious and intriguing. As arguably the most prominent and admired artistic figure of his generation, David Bowie has had to this day a rich career spanning music, film, theatre and art. A master of reinvention, who refused his identity as a performer to ever be fixed, it is hard to know exactly what he is.

This retrospective leads you on an audiovisual experience into the many realities of the man behind the masks, through his life and influences from his early childhood and throughout his rise to fame, to the ‘Bowie effect’ visible today in many aspects of popular culture. It would seem that David Bowie is, in fact, everywhere.

The young Bowie, né David Robert Jones in 1947, grew up in South London where he spent his early years taking music and dance lessons, showing a striking ability for performance. The music which surrounded him as a child was that of Little Richard and Elvis Presley; the latter being a particular force in introducing Bowie to its pervading and powerful influence. He started and played in a number of bands in his youth, which is perhaps when he first became aware of the strength of presenting a particular personal image. His first album, ‘David Bowie’, released in 1967, was a disappointment commercially. It was not until 1969, with the release of ‘Space Oddity’, that Bowie first gained significant commercial success, and he has since released 27 studio albums and 150 live albums, music videos and singles.

Bowie draws his influences from an impressive range of theatre, art, film and literature, particularly J. D Ballard, whose novels were described as “mapping the creative territory that Bowie would roam across”. This exhibition energetically draws together the myriad of cultural cross-references which have informed his work. You are accompanied by a specially compiled sequence of audio clips as you walk amongst the elaborate costumes worn by Bowie, projections of his music videos and films, lyrical diary entries, photographs, sketches and even an endearingly unobtrusive tissue stained with his lipstick from 1974. The exhibition itself seems to emulate Bowie’s own “playfully subversive relationship to reality”, through clever use of mirrors, peepholes, lighting and changing images.

Charlotte Bellamy

Daily 10.00 – 17.30 Friday 10.00 – 21.30 tickets valid anytime between 10.00 and 16.00 Exhibition closes 15 minutes prior to the Museum closing
Address:
Cromwell Road, London, Great Britain
SW7 2RL London, Great Britain

Access:
By tube: South Kensington, Knightsbridge, Gloucester Road By bus: 430, 14, 74, 414, C1, 360, 345, 49 By train: Victoria