Ballets in the Dark : Elegant Displays of Inelegance
BARRY NEMETT
As if with his middle finger, which he seemed to extend, as well, to anyone who passed by his early, cartoony canvases, Tony Shore first painted the people who inhabited the neighborhoods where he grew up. When MICA and Yale replaced Pigtown and Morrell Park; open books replaced addicts’ discarded syringes; and Caravaggio and Rembrandt replaced rage and Robert Crumb, Tony wound up replacing that finger of his for a masterful, compassionate brush. Ultimately, that brush has come to dignify a core group of friends and family members without ignoring gangs of thugs who came with the territory. READ MORE
TONY SHORE: HARRY ESSAY BY KERR HOUSTON
Attention, paid
Fifteen years after I first encountered (during an open studio tour at Yale in the mid-1990s), Tony Shore’s paintings on velvet, I can still recall my immediate reactions. I remember feeling unsettled by what felt like a grave monumentality: a stoic desire to record and even commemorate an aspect of life in an East Coast city that I did not yet know well. I remember the dense, private blacks, which seemed to possess some of the active, Manichean energy of the shadows in Rembrandt’s etchings. And I remember thinking, too, that these images were something new in my experience: a combination of kitschy material and apparent sincerity that treated urban family life in a tone that was at once sympathetic and unromanticizing. READ MORE
VELVET TOUCH
ALLISON KLEIN, BALTIMORE SUN
On South Stricker Street, where outsiders are unwelcome unless they have drugs or money to share, Tony Shore has neither. He pulls up in his teal Ford Escort and, like a traveling street vendor, pulls a few unframed paintings from the trunk and props them against the car. His casually hip clothes and Yale sticker in the car window go little noticed by the people who spend every sweltering afternoon on these streets like it's their living room. They have known him all 28 years of his life, since before his clothes were cool, before he could hold a paint brush. READ MORE
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
By Michael Anf, Baltimore Magazine
TONY SHORE’S BLACK VELVET PAINTINGS RENDER DOWN-TO-EARTH, WORKING-CLASS BALTIMORE AS HIGH ART.
In a windowless space inside the old Crown Cork and Seal complex in Highlandtown, Tony Shore works amid a post-industrial landscape—a labyrinth of hulking brick buildings. Amid walls shedding decades-old paint, he’s feverishly creating new work for a show at C. Grimaldis Gallery and living off a diet fit for a portly middle schooler which, even as an adult, he resembles. Diet Pepsi, peanut butter, and lunch meat—caloric and caffeinated fuel for a working-class hero. READ MORE
PICTURING THE DARK SIDE
Glenn McNatt, Baltimore Sun
SHORE EXPLORES SAME NOIR DEPICTED ON `THE WIRE'
After seeing Violence and Tranquility, Tony Shore's unexpectedly dark vision of his hometown at C. Grimaldis Gallery, I couldn't help thinking the prize-winning Baltimore painter has been watching The Wire, HBO's award-winning dark drama about crime and corruption in Baltimore.
The Wire is classic American film noir for the small screen. Shore's unsparing images of gang warfare and violent crime bring the same moral ambivalence, alienation and gratuitous cruelty to the gallery scene. READ MORE