The magic number
Three, it seems, really is the magic number.
Next month, Pure Evil gallery in London’s East End is spreading its wings, moving from its usual Hoxton haunt into the huge Londonewcastle Project Space in Redchurch Street (home of the Anti Design Festival) for its new exhibition, called Three.
In a deliberate move away from curating and ‘intellectualising’, the show will see three galleries across the world – London, Paris and LA – invite selected artists to exhibit three works each.
There are no guidelines or stipulations: the only constraint is that each artist must provide three works, of any medium or size.
Charley Uzzell Edwards, aka Pure Evil, says the idea came about because three is his favourite number.
He explains, ‘It’s based on euphoria – it’s all new. I’m the kind of guy who gets insomnia, so I look on people’s websites.
‘One of my theories is the “culture of the thumbnail” – you click on it and it leads you to a whole artist’s oeuvre.’
A quick browse on the Pure Evil Tumblr blog is the perfect manifestation of this “culture of the thumbnail”, offering a mesmerising insight into what we might expect from this upcoming ‘anything goes’ style show.
The diversity is stunning: works from the cherry-picked artists range from ink on cotton to photography to sculpture to paint, all chosen purely on the basis that Pure Evil liked them.
Uzzell Edwards says, ‘Those images just give a you a feeling of the show itself. You go onto certain blogs and you see 7000 thumbnails in a few hours. We’re constantly bombarded with these images – now I want to see them on a large scale.’
Just a few of the highlights include the arresting monochrome images from San Francisco based printmaker Grady Gordon, who works with ink on glass; Isaac Cordal’s small concrete figures; Caribbean artist Wendell McShine’s colourful ink work; and Jeanne Briand’s glass uterus.
It’s also hoped that the show will feature film nights, talks and live music. But really, it seems, anything goes: ‘I don’t want to direct people’, says Uzzell Edwards. ‘I’m just excited to see what shows up.’
Three is open from 2 – 31 December, Londonewcastle Project Space, 28 Redchurch Street, London E2
Great works