Continuing through February 8, 2026
It is unusually satisfying to walk into a room filled with stained glass, which is just the starting point of Judith Schaechter’s “Super/Natural” exhibition. The perception of light filtered directly through the elements comes as a balm to the many hours most of us spend before the cold glare of a digital screen. It is a question of transmission versus emission. Stained glass is one of those technologies that has stood the test of time, popularized in the Middle Ages as a method of illuminating architectural space with a sense of transcendence into the inner sanctum of the Christian church and the mosque of Islam. “Super/Natural,” a secular stained-glass chapel built for one viewer at a time, stands surrounded by a selection of seven smaller stained-glass works exhibited as wall hangings mounted on light boxes.
Schaechter has dedicated herself completely to stained glass. Using rotary engraving tools and diamond files on flashed glass, which is a thin layer of color fused onto a clear or pale underlayer, she grinds her imagery through varying layers of translucency, not unlike the Renaissance underpainting technique of imprimatura. But Schaechter is quick to point out that her work is in the tradition not of painting but rather of carving. In fact, she recalls her rejection of painting early on in her art school days, when she abandoned it due to the pressure to be “so serious” and “unbelievably profound.” “What had come freely to me as a child had somehow disappeared while I was in art school,” she recalls of her experience in academia, with its emphasis on being part of an art world-sanctioned dialog that for Schaechter came to be largely divorced from authenticity and wonder. She migrated to the glass studios, where educational focus was on craft, allowing her inner child and creative freedom to return. There, she fell in love with a medium and process that she hasn’t parted from since.
The work in “Super/Natural,” while grounded in a deep knowledge of the medium’s history and methods, is suffused with awe. Despite its liturgical impact from afar, the imagery is marvelously goofy and idiosyncratic. “Swarm” (2023) unexpectedly but fittingly brings to mind the raucous and carnivalesque James Ensor painting, “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889” (1888), thanks to a great surge of cartoonish insects that bulge out from illusionistic perspective like a cosmic belch of new life. The effect is Sainte Chapelle meets SpongeBob SquarePants. “The Life Ecstatic” (2016) presents a nude female figure floating in a fractured array of stylized naturalia. Her gesture quotes Bernini’s erotic “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” (1652), but the distorted bodily proportions feel, dissonantly, like a fusion of Mannerism and graphic novel illustration.
The eponymous centerpiece of the exhibition is the outcome of a residency at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroaesthetics, which is devoted to the study of the neural and cognitive basis of aesthetic experiences. Schaechter’s research during her residency became an exploration of biophilic design, architectural space, and secular, spiritual, and contemplative experience in the form of her largest work to date. The result is an intimate inundation of illuminated imagery that invokes an age-old link between the natural sciences, the decorative arts, and the artistic output of so many spiritual traditions.
As with the meticulously rendered drawings by the Spanish scientist Santiago Romón y Cajal, the observation of the world situates us in a spectrum of the micro-to-macrocosm, revealing the way a neuron resembles a tree root resembles a watershed resembles a cosmic ray. Schaechter harnesses these formal relationships and the biophilic principle that our affinity to natural systems is an inherent expression of human existence, surrounding us with observationally informed but creatively constructed flora and fauna.
“Beauty,” though the thematic underpinning of the exhibition, is thrown about too freely in the accompanying literature and wall text. Left underexamined, this quality is a blunt presumption in the description of the show. However, the work itself conveys a more decisive and nuanced relationship to the concept, and the fact that the figures in their distortions are weirdly miserable saves them from triteness or sentimentality.
To Schaechter, the realm of the beautiful includes “anxiety in the form of death,” or suffering. “Super/Natural” echoes elegant Dutch floral still life painting, hiding in its opulence small symbols serving as memento mori, or an illuminated ghazal, its tortured lament over the pain of love decorated in exquisite geometric design. All are celebratory visual statements reminding us of the transience of things and experiences. The greatest reward goes to the viewer who, taking the time to look more deeply, sees the darker details camouflaged in the light, which are there as if to whisper: Make hay while the sun shines! Life is beautiful, complicated, and brief.
