PURE EVIL
GCA GALLERY
info@gcagallery.fr
www.gcagallery.fr
GCA Gallery PARIS – by appointment
GCA Gallery NICE – 16bis rue Catherine Ségurane – 06300 – Nice
Tuesdays to Fridays 2:30 – 6:30 pm
Phone : +33 6 09 07 75 99
The son of John Uzzell Edwards, Charles Uzzell Edwards (Pure Evil) grew up in the valleys of Wales. Inspired by music and fashion he was by his own admission ’The only new romantic in the village. His interest in Street Style and Pop Culture led him to London where he studied Fashion in the late 80’s and in 1990 Charles left the ruins of Thatcher’s Britain for a new life on the West Coast , California USA where he became a designer for influential streetwear clothing label ANARCHIC ADJUSTMENT, producing clothes and screenprinting t-shirt graphics and becoming involved in the electronic music scene in San Francisco, eventually ending up a recording artist for ambient record label FAX based in Frankfurt, Germany.
After 10 years in California , influenced heavily by West Coast Graffiti artists like TWIST and REMINISCE he returned to London , picked up a spray can and started painting weird fanged PURE EVIL bunny rabbits everywhere. Pure Evil fell in with the people behind Banksy’s SANTAS GHETTO and started producing prints for PICTURES ON WALLS. He was refused entry back into the USA, and subsequently started plotting and producing dark new prints and artwork back in a tiny shed in the Black Mountains of Wales. He moved back to London, debuted his first PURE EVIL SOLO SHOW and from the success of that, opened up his eponymous PURE EVIL GALLERY in a Dickensian old shop and basement in Shoreditch in the East End of London in 2007 and a second gallery a few years later.
As an artist in the past 15 years PURE EVIL has exhibited worldwide in Indonesia, Cambodia, China, Sri Lanka, Russia, Mongolia, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, USA and all over Europe, and as an ‘Accidental Gallerist’ He has produced over 50 different exhibitions with emerging and established artists at the Gallery and Inernationally. He regularly gives workshops and participates in lectures about street art.
To understand a bit about Charles Uzzell Edwards (Pure Evil) it is illuminating to know that he is a descendant of Sir Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor who wrote the controversial work Utopia and who was later beheaded by King Henry VIII.
With this busy background (Sir Thomas was later canonised) it is only natural that Pure Evil should explore 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 its conflicts to an end. 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 is 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.