The Alchemists

27.02.2026

Anselm Kiefer, born in 1945, the German artist we know for The Seven Heavenly Palaces at Hangar Bicocca, became deeply admired there through those majestic creatures that mark our complex time. Now he returns with 42 large canvases that clothe the Sala delle Cariatidi and the small skylight room of Palazzo Reale in Milan.

The Alchemists lies at the heart of his exhibition, curated by Gabriella Belli. With this project, Kiefer pays tribute to the women who, between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, made decisive contributions to the birth of scientific thought: Maria the Jewess, inventor of fundamental tools and processes for the distillation and sublimation of substances; Cleopatra the Alchemist, active in Alexandria and author of symbolic texts and diagrams; and Trotula de Ruggiero, associated with the Salerno medical school and a key figure in medieval medicine. These personalities—suspended between science, spirituality, and experimentation—long remained at the margins of official narratives.

Anselm Kiefer’s work belongs to that European postwar trajectory that intersects with the research paths we have always followed, from Art Informel to the postwar avant-gardes. In The Alchemists, we find once again the same tension between matter, history, and experimentation that marked those movements, expressed here on a monumental and profoundly contemporary scale.

Anselm Kiefer. The Alchemists
Palazzo Reale, Milan, until 27 September 2026.