Saturday 25 April 2026 – Exhibition ANSELM KIEFER, LE ALCHIMISTE – Palazzo Reale, Milan

‘Le Alchimiste’ (The Alchemists), the impressive new exhibition by Anselm Kiefer, one of the most influential contemporary artists, will be on display in the Sala delle Cariatidi (Hall of the Caryatids) at Palazzo Reale. The exhibition is part of the cultural programme of the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic games.

Le Alchimiste is the result of a project launched in 2023 and features over forty large canvases, specially designed to interact with the dramatic beauty of this place marked by the bombing of 1943.

Central to the exhibition is the link with Milan, the city where Caterina Sforza, scientist and military leader, spent her youth and authored a rare manuscript containing over 400 recipes for medicines and alchemical formulas. Alongside her, Kiefer summons a constellation of female figures, both famous and forgotten: from Isabella Cortese and Maria la Giudea to Marie Meudrac, Rebecca Vaughan and Mary Anne Atwood. Through his material and symbolic painting, the artist restores faces and bodies erased from history, recognising the crucial role of female alchemists in the birth of modern scientific thought.

Since his debut in the early 1970s, Kiefer has explored the creative and redemptive powers of women, here translated into a female pantheon that intertwines myth, memory and regeneration.