Pure Evil Gallery

The Pure Evil Gallery at 108 Leonard Street in London is a landmark street art space opened in late 2007 by Welsh graffiti artist Charles Uzzell-Edwards. Born in 1968 and a direct descendant of Sir Thomas More, Uzzell-Edwards created his signature fanged bunny logo and famous Nightmare Series featuring pop icons with black tears. The gallery showcases these stencil works alongside pieces containing hidden messages written in invisible UV ink.

London Β· from the walk β€œWalls That Talk: Shoreditch Street Art & Urban Creativity” Β· Generated

Open the walk

Pure Evil Gallery, 108 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4XS

Why do celebrity portraits in the Pure Evil Gallery feature a distinctive black tear?

Look up at the shopfront at one oh eight Leonard Street. This unassuming space... is one of Shoreditch's most important landmarks in street art history. Welcome to the Pure Evil Gallery.

The man behind it all is Charles Uzzell-Edwards, born in nineteen sixty-eight, a Welsh graffiti artist known by the moniker Pure Evil. And here's the thing most people don't know... 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 the Eighth. Somewhere between that fifteen thirty-five execution and the year two thousand... an entirely new kind of artist was born.

Charles grew up in South Wales and was, by his own account, the Only new romantic in the village. He spent his teenage years customising his own clothes and experimenting with eyeliner. After the Poll Tax Riots in Trafalgar Square, he decided to leave Thatcherite London for what was supposed to be a two-week trip to California... which turned into a Ten-year stay in San Francisco.

There, he became one of the designers for the streetwear clothing line Anarchic Adjustment and even DJ'd and was an electronic recording artist for Pete Namlook's ambient music label. But the West Coast graffiti scene changed everything for him.

Now here's where it gets dramatic. When the US denied Pure Evil's application for re-entry, it was a "Deus ex Machina" moment, where his life changed direction in a completely unplanned way. The ban forced him to remain in the UK for a decade, leading to a period of creative isolation in the Black Mountains of Wales, where he honed his skills in collage and stencil art.

And That isolation is what gave us his most iconic creation! The artist explained in a Bbc interview that his famous fanged bunny showed up one day in his sketchbook. The image came from a hare he had killed with a shotgun in his youth, and it had returned to haunt him for his past sins. The label Pure Evil went bag and baggage with the symbol.

Back in London, he connected with key figures of the new wave of English street art, including Banksy, D-star-Face, Ben Eine, and Paul Insect. Together, they participated in Santa's Ghetto, a travelling gallery created to challenge the commercial logic of the art market.

The success of his early shows enabled him to open this very gallery in Shoreditch in late two thousand seven. Look around inside and you'll likely spot his famous Nightmare Series... portraits of icons of pop culture and American cinema, from Marilyn Monroe to Jackie Kennedy, each depicted with a distinctive black tear running down their faces. But what does that tear mean? It reflects his view of "lost innocence" and the darker side of celebrity culture.

And here's one more secret. Some of his pieces here contain hidden messages written in UV ink... invisible to the naked eye. As the artist himself has said, if you scratch the surface, there's usually darkness underneath. Pure and evil... light and dark... all in one extraordinary space on Leonard Street.

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