From 7 February to September 2026, the Sala delle Cariatidi in Palazzo Reale in Milan will host thirty-eight large canvases by Anselm Kiefer, curated by Gabriella Belli. A tribute to women alchemists often condemned to invisibility

Caterina Sforza, Isabella Cortese, Maria la Giudea, Marie Meudrac, Rebecca Vaughan, Mary Anne Atwood, Anne Marie Ziegler: these are some of the alchemists at the centre of the eponymous cycle of thirty-eight canvases created by Anselm Kiefer for the Sala delle Cariatidi in Palazzo Reale in Milan, host of the major exhibition scheduled from 7 February to September 2026. 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 with the support of main sponsors Unipol and Banca Ifis, the exhibition is part of the cultural programme of the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games.
“The Women Alchemists, an exhibition by Anselm Kiefer, one of the leading figures in contemporary art,”, explains curator Gabriella Belli, “is a project that began in 2023, conceived and created for the Sala delle Cariatidi in Palazzo Reale, the result of a dialogue between the artist and Piermarini’s superb 18th-century architecture, with its striking sequence of forty caryatids supporting the perimeter entablature of the hall. Mythical figures, designed to decorate the magnificent Hall of Mirrors and now ghosts of a lost beauty, wounded and mutilated by the fire caused by Allied bombing in 1943, which devastated the ceiling and the ornaments”. The exhibition brings to the fore the story of female figures often condemned to oblivion, yet guardians of knowledge and insights fundamental to the birth of modern scientific thought. “Like the Caryatids mutilated by war, women alchemists have also suffered a severe affront from history, which, with a few rare exceptions, has denied their role and identity for centuries, condemning them to unjust anonymity, even though their contribution to the research of this proto-science was neither trivial nor residual compared to that of men”, the curator adds.
Kiefer thus returns to explore a recurring theme in his research – the representation of women’s creative and redemptive powers throughout history – allowing the faces and bodies of the protagonists to emerge from a painting that is both material and symbolic, capable of evoking the vicissitudes of female scientists ahead of their time, makers of extraordinary studies and discoveries yet subjected to exclusion and renunciation. “They were pioneers in experimenting with the medicinal properties of herbs”, says Gabriella Belli, “in preparing potions obtained through alembics and distillation, intended for the health of the body, not to mention beauty ‘remedi’, to which they made an innovative and, at the time, widespread contribution. At a time when science, as we understand it today, was still stumbling between experimentation and fantasy, improvisation and rationality, women, subverting the priorities that underpinned alchemical work, primarily the search for the philosopher’s stone, the Opus Magnum, looked mainly at the practical application of the results of their experiments, thus overshadowing the philosophical and esoteric speculations of men in terms of benefits and usefulness”.
Myth, memory and collective history, identity, destruction and regeneration – key themes in Kiefer’s poetics – form the basis of the site-specific installation designed for the Sala delle Cariatidi, which housed Picasso’s Guernica in 1953 and, in the decades that followed, the setting for exhibitions named after eminent figures in the world of art.
The link with Milan is further strengthened by the inclusion of Caterina Sforza among the women alchemists who are the subject of Kiefer’s work. The daughter of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, where she spent her youth, Caterina Sforza was a scientist, condottiera and author of a rare manuscript containing more than four hundred recipes for medicines, cosmetics and alchemical formulas, gaining a leading role in a discipline from which women were perpetually excluded.
“The exhibition”, says the curator, “will welcome visitors as a great gathering of daring and stubborn wills and intellects, a sabbath of feminine energies and passions, which, for the first time, thanks to the artist, have gained a face, a name and a recognisability dictated, albeit with the painter’s licence, by an iconography that draws on the suggestions contained in the very rare biographical notes that have come down to us, all useful information for reconstructing their identities, freely interpreted, of course, but sufficient to bring them to life”.

Arianna Testino

INFO
KIEFER. The Women Alchemists
from 7 February to September 2026
Sala delle Cariatidi
PALAZZO REALE
Piazza del Duomo 12, Milan
https://www.palazzorealemilano.it