From 13 May–24 May, Castle Fine Art Exeter presents a special exhibition of works by Boy George — artist, performer and one of the most distinctive creative voices to emerge from late twentieth-century British culture.

Though known around the world for his impact on music and fashion, Boy George’s visual art stands in its own right: expressive, layered and unmistakably personal. Rich with humour, tenderness, memory and theatrical flair, his works reflect a lifelong engagement with identity and image-making, drawing together portraiture, autobiography, ornament and cultural history.

At the heart of the exhibition is a body of work shaped by the spirit of the Blitz generation — the artists, designers, club figures and cultural outsiders who transformed London nightlife into a radical space of self-invention. For Boy George, this is not borrowed iconography or retrospective fascination but lived experience. His art emerges from within that world, carrying forward its energy, irreverence and refusal of convention.

The works demand attention not just for their subjects, but for how they're made. Surfaces are encrusted, layered, and built-up using beads, buttons, zips, sequins, safety pins, vinyl records are stitched and assembled by hand. These are portraits you want to touch, objects that carry the weight and texture of the world they came from. They recall the improvised glamour of New Romantic style, in which clothing and self-presentation became acts of imagination — built from bricolage, resourcefulness and whatever could be transformed into something extraordinary.

Sequins catch the light like stage costume or nightclub interiors; beads create rhythm and texture; vinyl introduces a direct connection to sound; and found fashion objects carry traces of their past lives. These aren't just portraits — they're relics, somewhere between image and object, fine art and fashioned surface.

Across the exhibition, Boy George returns to the people, moods and energies that shaped his artistic world. David Bowie appears. Elvis. Leigh Bowery. Alongside them, imagined figures — androgynous punks and otherworldly personas. Portraits become more than likenesses: they are acts of remembrance, homage and reinterpretation. Some evoke the icons and personalities of a transformative cultural moment; others a landscape of glamour, performance, friendship, artifice and vulnerability. In each case, identity is never fixed. It is made, staged, adorned, questioned and reimagined.

What distinguishes the work is its ability to hold apparent opposites together. Flamboyant and intimate, humorous and reflective, polished and improvised. Art as self-construction — not disguise, but revelation. Boy George has always understood style as more than surface. It's survival. Communication. Joy. That sensibility runs through every piece.
At a moment when the art world is looking closely at texture, handwork and the 1980s Boy George’s work is an exciting introduction. Frieze 2025 foregrounded textile and material-based practices. The Tate Modern staged the Leigh Bowery exhibition. The Design Museum and National Portrait Gallery have revisited the decade's style, performance and self-invention.

Yet where those exhibitions look in from the outside. This one comes from someone who was there — not a retrospective, but a live report shaped by memory, friendship, and costumes stitched together in bedsits and worn like armour. It occupies a space where art, fashion, music and personal mythology meet, while remaining grounded in the handmade and the human. These are works rooted in visual culture, lived history and material invention — pieces that carry forward the defiant creativity of a scene that reshaped British style.

At Castle Fine Art Exeter, Boy George brings together a body of work that is exuberant, thoughtful and unapologetically individual: a celebration of making, of memory, and of the enduring power of creating oneself anew.