Anselm Kiefer Transforms Milan’s War-Scarred Palazzo Reale With Monumental Tribute to Forgotten Women of Science

BY EMMANUEL OGBONNA

German contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer has unveiled a sweeping, site-specific exhibition inside Milan’s Palazzo Reale, transforming one of the city’s most haunting ceremonial spaces into a meditation on history, loss and overlooked achievement. Titled The Women Alchemists, the exhibition was previewed Tuesday as part of Milan’s cultural program accompanying the 2026 Winter Olympics.

The installation occupies the Sala delle Cariatidi, a vast ballroom whose battered grandeur bears the scars of a 1943 Allied bombing during World War II. The hall’s defining features are its caryatids—once-elegant sculpted female figures that served as architectural supports—now eroded and fragmented, deliberately left unrestored as a memorial to wartime destruction. For Kiefer, the room’s unresolved state proved immediately compelling.

“The space itself spoke,” Kiefer said, explaining that the damaged figures suggested a broader story of women whose presence endured but whose identities and contributions were diminished or erased. From that encounter emerged the idea of “women alchemists,” figures from early science and medicine whose work, he said, was largely absorbed into male-dominated historical narratives.

Now 80, Kiefer is among the most influential artists to emerge from postwar Germany, renowned for monumental works that confront collective memory, trauma and the weight of history. For this exhibition, he created 42 towering panels, some reaching six meters in height, each devoted to a woman associated with early practices of alchemy, chemistry and medicine. Though alchemy is often remembered as mystical or speculative, Kiefer presents it as a precursor to scientific inquiry—one in which women played a significant but often unacknowledged role.

“These were women who were equal to men, who experimented with medicine just as men did,” Kiefer said. “But history chose to remember the men.”

Despite that framing, Kiefer rejected the notion that the exhibition should be read as a feminist statement. Speaking to a crowded press conference, he dismissed the label with characteristic provocation, prompting laughter and applause. The show’s curator, Gabriella Belli, later offered a more measured interpretation, describing the exhibition as an act of recognition rather than an attempt to correct historical wrongs or advance an ideological position.

Originally, Kiefer envisioned suspending the massive works high on the walls, above the fragile caryatids. Conservation concerns ruled that out. Instead, the paintings are arranged across the ballroom floor in a zigzagging formation, like monumental screens. The layout forces visitors to navigate a deliberate path through the space, encouraging contemplation of each figure and her story.

The exhibition features 38 women in total, including Caterina Sforza, the formidable Renaissance noblewoman associated with Milan through her father, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan in the late 15th century. Kiefer renders each alchemist as a full-bodied presence, standing in stark contrast to the half-ruined caryatids that line the walls. The juxtaposition underscores both survival and loss—completeness set against fragmentation.

Color and texture play a dominant role. Thick, swirling layers of paint in blue-green, gold, black and silver lend the canvases a sense of material weight and chemical transformation. Many of the women are accompanied by sculptural plant forms, referencing the botanical foundations of early medicine, and by books symbolizing recorded knowledge. Veils, clouds and darkened skies evoke secrecy and the suspicion that often cast such women as witches rather than scholars.

Kiefer also incorporated the hall’s original mirrors into the visual logic of the exhibition. By recreating the Sala delle Cariatidi in his studio and carefully positioning reflective surfaces, he engineered visual echoes between the paintings and the space itself. The result, he said, is a dialogue between concealment and revelation, past and present.

Belli described Kiefer’s approach as inherently alchemical. In her view, his practice mirrors the process he depicts: creation followed by decay, then renewal. “For him, painting is always birth, destruction, regeneration,” she said. “That cycle is the essence of alchemy—the transformation of matter.”

The Women Alchemists will be on view from Feb. 7 through Sept. 27 and forms part of a broader cultural calendar designed to accompany the Winter Games. Other initiatives include the rare opening of a room in the Sforza Castle containing a wall painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, underscoring Milan’s effort to use the Olympics as a catalyst for renewed attention to its artistic heritage.

Kiefer’s relationship with Milan spans decades. His monumental installation The Seven Heavenly Palaces has long been a permanent fixture at the Hangar Bicocca, an industrial exhibition space on the city’s outskirts. The Palazzo Reale exhibition, equally imposing but more intimate in tone, offers a striking counterpoint.

Despite the scale and ambition of the project, city officials cautioned against reading permanence into the display. Milan’s cultural councilor, Tommaso Sacchi, said there are currently no plans to retain the works after the exhibition closes.

“I’m not here to announce a complete donation to Palazzo Reale,” Sacchi said with a smile, underscoring that, for now, The Women Alchemists remains a powerful but temporary intervention in one of Milan’s most resonant spaces.