The Foundry Underground Art Show

The Krah stands out among his Greek compatriots for several reasons, whilst he is one of the few male Greeks that hasn’t failed a sprinter’s drugs test in the last 4 years at the same time he has tested positive for having a seriously good time. He persuaded many of his friends from Greece and London to participate in a wacky group show in the old underground car park at Shoreditch’s Foundry bar.

Recently new to these shores is Australian artist Shannon Crees. Her combined multi-pigmented flesh tones, lush faces and montaged coiffures look lush, quite the star of the show, though you’d want a promise that the artist would touch up if the pieces started to fall apart hung above your radiator at home.


Shannon Crees



The Krah decorated a seriously big painted laminate board not with his usual hybrid mutoid Krahworld characters, just their abstract tentacle bits. The composition captures a sense of flow, of immersion and descent to the depths of an alien octopus lair. Deeply sweet as usual.


The Krah


One special bonus was catching up with Athens street artist Fors even though most of the pieces looked like a retina challenge for the kaleidoscope generation.


Fors



Pam Glew’s brooding and disturbing distressed horror flic chicks on flags beguile in a very very dark way. They are just so damn big, hopefully Pam will find a set of those small hand-held flags the crowds wave when returning American heroes like Earl Hickey drive through town. Interestingly, what was described as “discharge medium” at Black Rat’s charity show earlier this month is now translated as “bleach”, which is a relief.


Pam Glew



Cans 1 resulted in a surge of commercial screenprint, giclee and canvas activity from many of the artist involved. Anyway, if you short-sightedly thought that was a bad thing it would be grossly unfair to tar artists at this show with the same brush – The Krah, Copyright, Pure Evil, Shannon Crees, Richt and 45RPM all decorated tunnel walls at Cans Recycled – since this group was put together before the artists had been told about Cans Recycled (we are aware of one who was given just 2 days warning).

What Crew members Richt and 45RPM did some graphic doodles on montages of old 7” sleeves, not a single owl in sight.



Richt - 45RPM. Contender for worst show foto ever


Among the shot vacuum packaged cans, Blam has un-earthed a vintage tube map and paid
tribute to recognisable generic London sub-species.


Blam - London Calling



Rugman continues to mine children’s cartoon imagery though Minnie’s risqué provocative posing would raise eyebrows in most nurseries. Curious how this image draws you in yet when Bast does a Smurf with a 10 foot cock you can’t even look at it, how does that work? This camera was not tainted with such faux porno imagery so satisfaction must be derived from the mice, skulls and swaztika cliches here.


Rugman



Another gorgeous mini collection-ette was a set of drawings on cardboard boxes by (possibly – tbc) Lotz, they seemed to arrive halfway during the evening and they definitely left before the end and ended up on the street. Notwithstanding the serial offences under the Street-Art Bandwaggon Prevention Act, these were sweet.


Lotz of boxes


This show had a really enjoyable vibe and a ton of cool folk in attendance. The wackiest part of this former bank cellar space is that although the ramp down to the car park has been blocked off, the car turntable at the bottom has not been immobilised which lends itself to heaps of turntable surfing and centrifuge related beer slops, not to mention even a piece of lego art toppling as the whirly gig nearly rose off its spindle. Every gallery should have one.


The Turntable Surfah Crew – just a whizz

Other artists appearing at the show included Copyright, Pure Evil, Snub, Hutch, Mr Gauky, James Johnson, the 5685 and more. More pictures here.

Pure Evil Brighton Solo Show

Ink-d Gallery, Brighton
4 Jul - 2 Aug 08


Un-diluted, 100% concentrated, fully refined malevolence filled the sea air surrounding the Ink-d Gallery in Brighton. This phenomenon has a sweet herbal scent and its dark and threatening intents descend among humanity in the form of Pure Evil. The master of the double bluff shields his evil bunny alter-ego behind a veneer of decency which deceived a national press used-to-think-street-art-was-shite-but-now-it’s-value-has-rocketed-I-get-it art ponce who saw only the “sweet and smiley bloke, greying at the temples...”; all the better for clandestine manic outbursts of aerosol tourettes and paste-up madness on the streets.





Evil Bunny is a very real freeform wicked Oryctolagus cuniculus, it’s piercing eyes and sharp fangs threaten disorder, malice and sinister fun from many a wall.




So long as there is an evil bunny on a wall in Shoreditch, anarchistic artisans will find the Pure Evil gallery in Leonard Street a lighting rod for situationist fun, general chaos and the occasional bottle of Vedett beer. Prosecution has never had to struggle for evidence of Pure Evil’s street credentials.




Pearly Kings and Queens admire Swoon filigree, Jef Aerosol and The Krah hover



Pure Evil testifies for East London’s mandatory euthanasia program

And the Leonard Street Gallery doesn’t exactly softly whisper “Pure Evil” in grey micro lettering on a small white card.



Deep in the slimy dark vaults where Pure Evil fabricates his latest apocalyptic vision, the machinery has been busy exploring fresh craft techniques to propagate the message, honing the cutting edge sharpness of the artwork and improving quality control!

In autumn last year the evil bunny morphed into a neon light on canvas. Prospects for world domination increased dramatically when the neon evil bunny was put into a reflecting Perspex box, now the latest version of the infinite neon bunny comes brighter, in various colours and, thankfully, better manufactured - gone are the distracting electric cables to a hidden recess within the box which also improves the hanging.




That pretty awful last photo fails to capture an interesting feature of two of the show’s infinite neon bunnies; due to slight concavity of the outer surface of the box (or was it convexity of the back surface) the multiple reflections get bigger and bigger as the images recede into the distance, the earlier versions had bunnies which got smaller.

The Evil Bunny has chosen to spread its caustic influence by annexing the supposedly harmless motif of a butterflies stencilled on canvas, lending it the acidic fluorescent light outline while Pure Evil is subliminally cut into the mottled variegations on the butterfly wings.



This Pure Evil collection provides a first outing for images stencilled or silkscreen printed onto glass which is then painted behind to give a glossy fluorescent coloured or silver background, the stencilled image just leap off the pop art colours. Its like the images are stencilled onto ultra smooth polished coloured plastic and looks awesome.

Pure Evil hooked up with London’s pearly Kings and Queens earlier this year to produce a series of street paste ups and canvasses, emblazoned with Live East Die Young. Rather than repeat the simple stencil seen at Banksy’s Cans Festival a couple of months ago, Pure Evil has slapped the gorblimmeyluv kings and queens onto a glass with lurid pink background.




Pure Evil Bunny mission to add a bit of colour to walls the world over has been captured by blasting the CGI silver surfer off his board and carving a stencilled path through a canvas New York, spraying slogans and swear words down into the metroplolis as he goes.



Fresh from the Pure Evil crypt is the stencil on glass goya-esque apocalyptic vision of the Wild Thing leaving the war scene, winsomely titled “May God Have Mercy On My Enemies... Because I Won’t”.




Evil Bunny can’t even leave its friends in the Pure Evil show alone, well someone must be blamed for the Wild Thing on glass that appears to have an unfortunate case of spray paint diarrhoea.



Pure Evil’s cross-fertilises his work to produce bastard offspring of earlier pieces, such as the latex bunny woman, in a gimp mask natch, who now has silver buttons nicked from the pearly Kings and Queens.



Panda-ing (boom boom) to the edtioned print market, Pure Evil has produced the silk screened “Tagger Scum”.


"Tagger Scum"

Pure Evil can at times give the impression of having too many ideas rushed onto gallery walls but this show, notwithstanding the loose bowelled Wild Thing, has a polish to both content and product which would surprise anyone who hadn’t seen much Pure Evil beyond the Pictures On Walls panda prints.

Pure Evil’s show is too strong to be contained within the mere physical confines of gallery walls, psychadelic glows flood out under the doors, through the windows and quite possibly up the chimnies too. This show is a feast for the eyes and but beware, it may strike terror into your soul.

These and more pictures from the show can be seen here

www.ink-d.co.uk

Soozy Who?

Pure Evil Gallery, 108 Leonard St., London.
22 May – 3 June (I think) 2008

Soozy Lipsey is a name I have never heard of before but judging by the beau monde who turned out for her show, she must be very well known to some pretty damn cool and happening people. Obviously not having heard the name before this post can’t include any cross reference to a graffiti track record, but the suspicion is that this is urban style rather than street art coming in off the streets.

Soozy uses a lot of collaging and spray, and a lot of building up of layers on newspapers and other materials and tearing strips off. Her style is reminiscent of no one more than Faile.

Favourite piece of several in the show is one which puts a new meaning to the expression a set of killer heels.




Apart from Faile, some pieces had echoes of Eine.






At a slight stretch, strong dynamic whirls may conceivably suggest a heavier form of David Ellis, so knowingly or un-knowingly Soozy has been influenced by some pretty classy street artists.




Repeated viewing of Try Your Luck, the biggest canvas on show, is a bit like re-reading a great book, you find something new every time, a truely awesome piece.




A small selection of other pieces:












After catching sight of gods like Brett Anderson of Suede browsing the Soozy Lipsey, the smelly sweaty wall licking street art hoardes took refuge downstairs in The Krah show.

With both Soozy Lipsey upstairs and The Krah downstairs in the basement celler, Pure Evil has pulled off two of the strongest shows seen to date in his idiosyncratic space. If you are going to see Doze Green in The Leonard Street Gallery next week, you’d certainly wouldn’t find 30 minutes at Pure Evil’s wasted.

A fuller set of pictures of Soozy Lipsey’s work is here.

Banksy, No Lions, Eelus Group Show

Or Cans Festival: you created a monster


Words: NoLionsInEngland; pictures NoLions, Howaboutno and Alex The Greek


The gauntlet was thrown down. Cans Festival includes a come-one-come-all stencil participation event and…well, you can’t get onto the ramp unless you are a registered artist.

Brooding about this on Sunday night, I wondered how the heck I could get onto that ramp to photograph some of the awesome shit being thrown up on the un-scripted walls. Monday morning had held promise of a lie-in as it was a bank holiday, but a bolt of lightening hit the NoLions boudoir in the night – to get on that ramp, just got to somehow discover the artist within.

What image though? First thought was keep it small and simple, an animal silhouette, perhaps a butterfly but oh bugger hasn’t that been done to perfection by Messrs Evil and Walker already. Maybe a Leopard, but you couldn’t compete with Bansky’s Tag Leopard in the show. Then slowly slowly the penny dropped – how about a Lion based image.


Banksy

The story behind the name No Lions In England is that the lyrical wizard Ian Brown, previously lead singer in the Stone Roses, subsequently multiple album releasing god-like genius and also long standing street art aficionado many years ago was in a group panel discussion on TV when a demonised rasta man leaps up and started querying where the lions on the England badge came from as there had never been any lions in England. Ian Brown went on to record the track No Lions In England with a thumping bass line so low the bass strings hang somewhere down near the guitarist's ankles.

Having adopted the monikor about 4 years ago, it just seemed a good idea to create an image involving the three lions of the England football badge, and add red crosses through them.

After breakfast, an image of the badge was found on the net, tidied up, transferred to cardboard and luckily having an unused set of Stanley knive blades, the lion stencil was born. The cross was simple, and my daughter drew the words.



We checked in at Cans Festival reception,
“you got a stencil?”
“yup”
“you got cans?”
“errrrrr”

Some marshall guy allocating spaces comes over and takes us to the Colditz barrier separating the rock-up-and-spray talent from the rubber-neckers and suggests we slap ours under the Eelus tag. He then got us the black and the red sprays. By this time I realised the wall was as rough as a badgers rear end and as grubby as an ant-eaters breakfast, so our new friend gets us some white to prep. I believe this guy, dark top heavy mop of curly hair if that helps, may work for PoW though we hadn’t met before, and credit to him, he couldn’t have been more encouraging and helpful – we salute you.

Ably assisted by the young Miss No Lions, 5 minutes later we have both wielded a spray can for the first time ever and suddenly – this stencilling thing works!




And we were able to get close up pics of all the other un-billed genius’ art on that ramp - mission accomplished! Pictures of the have-a-go hereos work are here, and a description of the fun is in an earlier blog entry "Let Us Spray".






One thing the experience lacked was any kind of frission, it was legal, authorised and totally lacking that key element of graffiti – the danger of being caught. Why stop there? Realising that stencils can be re-used and with blog compadre HowAboutNo confessing to having a stencil of his own ready to go, a couple of pints of Guiness was all it took to generate sufficient dutch courage to have a go on the streets.





How can we avoid standing out like spare pricks in Shoreditch at home time on a Wednesday evening? That’s easy, pair of chinos, pink shirt, cufflinks, 20 marlboro. We almost faded into the walls.

3 pints of Guinness and 30 minutes pass, and next thing several walls in Shoreditch appear to be ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly more vandalised than before. It seems a sort of very polite dis-obedience.



Tomorrow, we may return to the scene of the crime to get some snaps of our handiwork which we may add to this blurb.

Did it work? Tonight’s mindless wall daubing is a minuscule vindication of what the organisers of Cans Festival set out to achieve, to spread wider the use of the spray can and stencil as a means of public expression, to unleash the un-suspected and hidden talent in us all. We like to believe that this is being repeated up and down the country and the seeds sown last weekend at Cans will flourish over the coming years.

Oh F@*k And Bugger, I almost forgot the Monday Update!

Seeing as I did it last Monday, and stuff is finally hotting up (i.e. I have enough new stuff to show)

Lets do this. . . . . .

Sleevefacery

The floundering efforts of two blokes with no talent or ideas of their own to copy an idea tried out by thousands of others. The mercifully brief lunchtime photo session was interupted by from time to time by proper artists Mau Mau, Beejoir and Pure Evil, who all left sniggering.





NoLions' exhibitionist streak was flaunted again, which is surprising considering he has so much to be modest about. He seemed to think he could shamelessly strip off and pretend he had the physique of a 10 year old boy but the reality is he looks like he has just eaten a 10 year old boy.




The no doubt soon to be extremly lush, but currently dank wet cellar under Pure Evil's studio was the setting, whose warning shot as we cautiously descended the rickety woodworm rotten stairs was "watch out for any puddles, that's hydrochloric acid". . . . . . .