Bowie’s Wallpaper
Bowie’s brief but fascinating venture into wallpaper design emerged from a much broader engagement with the visual arts that stretched across decades of his life and career. According to Paul Maréchal from the Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal, Bowie regarded painting not as a side hobby, but as an important component of his intellectual and artistic life. While globally recognized as a musician, actor and cultural provocateur who helped pioneer movements such as glam rock and plastic soul, Bowie also painted extensively, particularly during his Berlin years between 1976 and 1978, when visual art, reading and music became part of his effort to overcome severe cocaine addiction.
According to Maréchal, Bowie continued to devote substantial attention to painting and art collecting throughout the following decades, ultimately assembling a major private collection that was dispersed through a 2016 auction at Sotheby’s in New York. Although he lacked formal technical training as a painter, Bowie incorporated visual art deeply into his creative identity, culminating in his 1995 exhibition “New Afro/Pagan and Work: 1975–1995,” first staged at The Gallery in London’s Mayfair district.
According to DavidBowie.com, the exhibition was announced on March 31, 1995, as Bowie’s first solo exhibition of paintings, drawings, sculptures and installation work. The official press release described the show as featuring two “highly unusual wallpapers” created in collaboration with Laura Ashley after Bowie struggled to find a printer capable of producing them independently. Laura Ashley ultimately provided both the technical printing expertise and the floral underlays that became central to the finished designs.
It was for this exhibition that Bowie created the only two wallpaper designs he would ever produce. According to Maréchal, Bowie conceived the wallpapers not as commercial décor but as part of a larger installation intended to transform the gallery space itself into an extension of his artistic vision. Bowie explained his reasoning directly, saying: “I chose wallpaper because of its status as something incongruous, particularly in the world of art. I haven’t completely lost my sense of irony, you know!”
According to Gabrielle Galenda from AN Interior, the wallpapers were produced in an extremely limited run at a Laura Ashley printing facility in Wales, combining Bowie’s fascination with collage, visual juxtaposition and contemporary art with the company’s traditionally English floral aesthetic. While some accounts suggested that as many as fifteen rolls may have been produced, Maréchal reported that only seven eleven-meter rolls of each wallpaper were ultimately printed.
One wallpaper, eventually known as “Conflict” or “British Conflicts,” brought together several major figures from the British art world. According to the original 1995 press release reproduced by DavidBowie.com, the work featured a charcoal portrait of Lucian Freud positioned inside a Damien Hirst-style box. Maréchal later explained that Bowie placed the image against a purple floral background selected from Laura Ashley sample patterns. Bowie described the work on Dutch television as “traditional art in the hands of modern art,” framing the wallpaper as a deliberate collision between classical realism and contemporary conceptualism.
According to a Sotheby’s auction description for one surviving section of the wallpaper, Bowie’s constant reinvention as a musician and public figure resembled the evolving body of work of a visual artist, making the wallpaper itself feel like an extension of his larger artistic identity. Sotheby’s emphasized how the design juxtaposed Freud’s nude self-portrait and a Damien Hirst-inspired tank with a “traditional English chintz” floral pattern associated with Laura Ashley. The auction text further compared the work to larger crossovers between avant-garde art and commercial culture, citing collaborations such as Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground or Takashi Murakami and Louis Vuitton, arguing that “when the avant-garde meets the utilitarian, memorable creations result.”
According to Martin Schneider from Dangerous Minds, the wallpaper captured something essential about Bowie’s artistic sensibility by combining serious fine art with playful cultural juxtaposition. Schneider quoted writer Paul Gorman, who argued that using Freud’s work against a “quintessentially English Laura Ashley print” made the piece “very, very Bowie.”
Schneider also noted that Bowie’s relationship to Freud’s art was somewhat more complicated than simple admiration. According to Schneider, Bowie told The New York Times in 1998 that while he appreciated the “trickery” and “grungy” textures of Freud’s paintings, he did not fully accept the widespread view that Freud was Britain’s greatest living painter.
The wallpaper also reflected Bowie’s close engagement with the contemporary art world. According to Maréchal, Bowie regularly visited Hirst’s studio and even painted alongside him. Reflecting on the project years later, Bowie joked: “Hanging wallpaper isn’t my kind of thing, but I could definitely art direct, and I could light it beautifully. I could tell other people to hang it, believe you me.”
The second wallpaper, known as both “The Minotaur” and “The Crouch,” drew from Bowie’s own artwork rather than outside collaborators. According to the original press release reproduced by DavidBowie.com, the design portrayed one of Bowie’s charcoal drawings of a Minotaur and formed part of an installation titled “District 6,” which also incorporated African hairdressing advertisement boards. Maréchal later explained that the original drawing depicted a crouching Minotaur with explicit anatomical detail that Laura Ashley refused to print. Bowie ultimately altered the image, later joking that the collaboration had proceeded smoothly “apart from the castration.” Schneider noted that Reuters similarly reported Laura Ashley’s insistence on censoring the creature’s anatomy before production could proceed.
A photograph by Lord Snowdon captured Bowie posing beside the finished installation, in which the wallpaper adorned classical half-columns leaning against the gallery wall. According to Maréchal, Bowie viewed the wallpapers as part of a larger immersive environment in which lighting, placement and installation were as important as the paintings themselves. Rather than functioning as background decoration, the wallpapers became active components of the exhibition.
The wallpapers later acquired an unexpected afterlife through a charity project connected to Bowie’s longtime collaborator Brian Eno. According to Maréchal, Eno proposed cutting sections of the wallpaper into fragments for a War Child benefit project following the exhibition’s close. Schneider explained that the resulting event, “Pagan FunWear,” featured contributions from artists including Lou Reed, who designed a leather tie, and Jarvis Cocker, who contributed a pair of unusual shoes, alongside Bowie’s own “suit of bandages.”
Eno also assembled a limited-edition boxed set titled Antennae #1 containing a CD soundtrack, a photograph by Anton Corbijn, a watercolor by Patrick Hughes and an actual fragment of Bowie’s wallpaper. According to Schneider, the set originally sold for one hundred pounds and included an instruction manual written by Eno himself.
The production process behind the wallpapers was unusually elaborate. According to Maréchal, Laura Ashley technician Dan Smout recalled that the wallpapers were printed using engraved and chrome-plated copper cylinders in a volatile gravure printing process nicknamed “the bomb factory” because of the chemicals involved. Fourteen custom cylinders were ultimately required for the two designs, contributing to both their rarity and production cost.
More than a novelty experiment, the wallpapers reflected Bowie’s desire to treat exhibition design the same way he approached music and performance — as a total artistic environment. According to Maréchal, Bowie integrated lighting, installation, visual motifs and spatial presentation into a unified experience in which “the colour and motifs of his paintings became the performers.”