MILAN.- A monumental tribute to forgotten alchemists: a new site-specific work by Anselm Kiefer, one of the most influential contemporary artists on the international scene, will be unveiled at Palazzo Reale. This immersive exhibition, specially conceived for the Sala delle Cariatidi, will invite visitors to engage with works that reflect on history, painting, and female memory.
Promoted by the Municipality of Milan–Culture and produced by Palazzo Reale and Marsilio Arte, with the contribution of Gagosian and Galleria Lia Rumma and supported by Main Sponsors Unipol and Banca Ifis, the exhibition is part of the cultural programme of the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026. Curated by art historian Gabriella Belli, it will be held in the Sala delle Cariatidi at Palazzo Reale in Milan from February 7th through September 2026.
A site specific-work for Sala delle Cariatidi
The Women Alchemists unfolds in a cycle of thirty-eight large-scale canvases, created to resonate with the dramatic beauty of the Sala delle Cariatidi: a majestic setting which continues to evoke a past of both splendor and ruin, marked by the scars of the 1943 bombing. Since exceptionally hosting Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica in 1953, the Sala delle Cariatidi has, over the years, hosted exhibitions and projects by outstanding artists.
Women and alchemy
The project has a special connection with the city of Milan, where Caterina Sforza lived during her youth. She was the daughter of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan: a scientist, military leader, and author of a rare manuscript containing more than 400 recipes for medicine, cosmetics, and alchemical formulas. Kiefer gives voice to her, along with several other female alchemists who have been largely forgotten by official history. While some – such as Caterina Sforza, Isabella Cortese, and Mary the Jewess – are relatively well-known, others, including Marie Meudrac, Rebecca Vaughan, Mary Anne Atwood, and Anne Marie Ziegler, remain rather obscure. Through his material and strongly symbolic painting, Kiefer brings to light what has been buried: faces and bodies emerging from his canvases like apparitions, revealing a world of female intelligence that was persecuted, concealed, yet essential to the birth of modern scientific thought. Since the beginning of Anselm Kiefer’s career in the early 1970s, a recurring theme in his oeuvre has been the depiction of the creative and redemptive powers of women throughout history.
Alchemy, art, and the feminine: a new pantheon
The exhibition goes beyond historical recovery—it constructs a new female pantheon, where alchemists reappear from the past through the vision of the artist. Their features are both drawn from scarce biographical records, as well as shaped by the painter’s imagination.
These spectral figures, suspended between myth, science, magic, and philosophy, recount stories of experiments and discoveries, medical remedies, and beauty treatments. Proto-scientists, adept at handling alembics and furnaces, they devised distillation processes and remedies for body and mind alike. Their stories also speak of exclusion, disguises, condemnations, and abjurations. Women of intuitive brilliance and rigor, they sought answers through nature, dedicating themselves to a practical, experimental knowledge at a time before modern science. They oriented themselves more towards the care of body and spirit, than the abstract pursuit of the philosopher’s stone.
A unique artistic and symbolic project
The canvases of The Women Alchemists can be seen as inseparable. They form a single, profoundly symbolic work in which the central themes of the artist’s oeuvre are intricately interwoven: myth, history, collective memory, identity, destruction and regeneration. Painting becomes an alchemical language, where its process, including the use of electrolysis and fire, become narrative tools.
Each painting offers itself as an act of resurrection: an emerging identity, a story, a matter transfigured. Interpreting the alchemical motto Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius” (“the obscure through the more obscure, the unknown through the even more unknown”), Kiefer invites visitors into an emotionally charged, almost initiatory experience.
A landmark exhibition-event in Milan
Conceived for the Sala delle Cariatidi – a space already steeped in historical significance – The Women Alchemists is a major cultural event for Milan and the international art scene, reaffirming Palazzo Reale’s intention to dialogue with contemporary art. The exhibition also pays homage to Milan, the city of Leonardo and a place of scientific and cultural tradition, through the figure of Caterina Sforza, an heir and witness to the Sforza era. The inauguration will coincide with the opening of the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026, and the exhibition will run through September 2026, intertwining with the city's main events.
The exhibition catalogue, published by Marsilio Arte and edited by Gabriella Belli, includes essays and contributions by Natacha Fabbri, Gabriele Guercio, and Lawrence Principe.
