Why Bowie Never Goes Out of Style

David Bowie, the art-school dropout turned rock star, never goes out of fashion.

A new installation by Steve McQueen, in which Bowie posthumously co-stars, has just opened in Bilbao and a rarely seen self-portrait heads to auction in London this month.

Painted in 1996, the angsty self-portrait is expected to fetch more than $72,000 at Sotheby’s British and Irish Day Sale on October 15. It reflects Bowie’s love of German Expressionism and harks back to his early interest in becoming a visual artist. He dropped out of Croydon College of Art, and the rest is glam rock history.

Jen Hardie, Sotheby's senior specialist, Modern British art, stresses how Bowie's "direct gaze and handprints pressed onto the composition create an unusually personal connection to the artist".

Meanwhile in northern Spain. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has opened McQueen’s new installation, 66–76–26. He has paired stripped-down recordings of the song Wild Is the Wind performed by David Bowie in 1976 and Nina Simone a decade earlier to create an emotional duet that neither artist performed in real life.

McQueen describes the work, presented in an almost empty gallery, as “almost like a requiem for love”.

Next month, the V&A museum sends highlights of the Bowie archive in its collection north to its Scottish satellite. Titled David Bowie: On Tour, the show is due to open at the V&A Dundee on November 4.

A master of blurring art, fashion, and celebrity, Bowie gave fellow adoptive New Yorker Jeff Koons some surprising advice, as the artist recently revealed in an interview with The Times of London. Ahead of a fashion shoot, Bowie told Koons: “You can never go wrong with the turtleneck.”