Thursday, April 28th / 7 PM / Free

Howl! Happening—home of the Elizabeth Murray memorial wall—is pleased to present a moving portrait of the artist by filmmaker Paul Tschinkel. Elizabeth Murray’s distinctive and unusual paintings made her one of the foremost artists working in New York. She died in 2007. A pioneering painter, Murray’s distinctively shaped canvases break with the art-historical tradition of illusionistic space in two-dimensions. Jutting out from the wall and sculptural in form, her paintings and watercolors playfully rejuvenate old art genres—blurring the line between the painting as an object and the painting as a space for depicting objects in 3D. Breathing life into domestic subject matter, her paintings often include images of cups, drawers, utensils, chairs, and tables. These familiar objects are matched with cartoonish figures and floating eyeballs—macabre images that are as nightmarish as they are goofy–and reveal her fascination with dream states and the feminist psychological underbelly of domestic life. The film, made in 1989, includes an interview with the artist, her dealer Paula Cooper, New York Times art critic, Roberta Smith, and Robert Storr, curator of Murray’s 2005 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

PAUL TSCHINKEL is a painter with an MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. In the early 1970s he turned to video as an art form and thus became one of the first video artists in this new medium. In 1974 he turned to the fledgling New York cable TV system, producing a half hour weekly arts program–a gallery on television. (Paul Tschinkel’s Inner-Tube) In 1979, Paul Tschinkel began taping young bands in New York Clubs for his cable show, a program that ran for 3 years and that inspired and presaged MTV. Since then, he has produced a video series on contemporary art called ART/new york (artnewyork.org/store) which includes ELIZABETH MURRAY – No. 29.