Saul Chase

Brighton Local, 1980, Screenprint on Arches paper with 30 screens, Signed & Numbered ed. size 175, 28 x 22”

This signed screenprint is directly from the artist\'s very own collection and has never been hung. It has been stored with care since 1980 and is in mint condition. The artist has work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and this particular sceenprint is a part of the collection at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

The screenprint “Brighton Local“, 1980, memorializes a moment when the top of an elevated train car aligns perfectly with a station roof. This happens a hundred times a day at every elevated station, but on this particular afternoon, this particular mundane occurrence, bathed in bright sunlight became indelible.

Saul Chase’s silkscreen prints produced between 1976 and 1981, much like his paintings, present a hyper-romanticized version of a New York City semi-industrial landscape, that pre-gentrification, went mostly unnoticed and unloved. In these reverential renderings, nondescript architectural odds and ends - prosaic remnants of an earlier time - are reconstructed and cleansed of all human reference and narrative. Each image stands as a staged rendition of a singular experience that’s been revisited through time and perfected.

Mentored by the legendary silkscreen printer, Alexander Heinrici, a close friend in the early days of Soho, Chase produced 12 landmark editions. All aspects of the process were performed by the artist, working alone in the roof house print shop of his Greene Street studio, using only hand cut film. Each image required between 30-40 screens or colors.