“Sometimes you have to destroy to create” – Pure Evil
Since launching in February, Boxpark’s outdoor art gallery has developed an extraordinary calendar of upcoming exhibitions. The Art Exhibition Gallery at Boxpark features 18 Art Boards along the top-level between twenty units at 40”x 60” each. Adorning the walls of the food, and beverage and charity units, The Gallery creates a space for art that can be viewed by the public 24 hours a day.
Each month, a new exhibition is presented, providing an opportunity for more talented artists to participate in the exhibitions. Beginning March 1st the upstairs gallery will feature new works by UK artist Pure Evil. Inspired by Warhol, Rosenquist and the 60s.
The collection, entitled “Pure Evil Goes Pop!” is a departure from the artist’s street art work and celebrates Warhol’s obsession with capturing beautiful, famous people. Icon Elizabeth Taylor is immortalized in the painting “Richard Burton’s Nightmare,” created from a palette of strange hues with subliminal meanings. “I have kept this whole collection of paintings very simple,” Pure Evil explains. “The features of the women are simplifi ed down to the most basic lines possible, cut into three stencil layers with a sharp blade, and labori-ously sprayed to build up the faces.
The eyes drip painted tears, the product of broken dreams of love.” Pure Evil UK street artist Pure Evil (Charles UzzellEdwards) was born in South Wales in 1968. A descendant of Sir Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor who wrote the controversial work “Utopia” and who was later beheaded by King Henry VIII, the artist’s legendary lineage is infl uential to his aesthetic.
To celebrate the show there’s a chance to win a signed, one off recreated print version of “J.FKennedy’s Nightmare,” (see above) just visit the Boxpark Facebook Page to enter. www.facebook.com/boxparkshoreditch
He is known for exploring the darker side of the wreckage of Utopian dreams and the myth of the Apocalypse, a belief in the life-changing event that brings history with all of its confl icts to an end. He notes, “If you scratch the surface of my artwork you will find something dark lying beneath.” Pure Evil has exhibited in the United States, China, Russia, UK, Mongolia, Brazil and France.
Pure Evils ancestry is alleged to include eight saints: Vladimir the Great, Saint Anna of Russia, the Holy Martyrs Boris and Gleb, Saint Stephen of Hungary, Saint Margaret of Scotland and Saint Mathilde together with Saint Thomas More, Humbert III of Savoy and several European royal families. He was also a descendant of the Old English Chieftain Ailric, Kings Thane to Edward the Confessor, who held Cawthorne and much of South Yorkshire before the Conquest.
Boxpark Art Gallery is at the epicentre of East London’s bustling creative scene. The new pop-up mall, located on the corner of Shoreditch High Street and Bethnal Green Road, now offers an outdoor gallery space on the top floor, with a vast corridor of expansive boards offering a blank canvas for the local creative community.
