The homage paid by Kiefer in his new Italian exhibition (feb 7th 2026 – sept 27th 2026) to the female mystics and proto-scientists of the Ancient and Modern Age strikes a perfect balance between acknowledgement and denunciation of their absence from the foreground of European culture.
The installation of the forty canvases in the Caryatides’ Hall, the most prestigious place within the Milanese Royal Palace, works upon the already confirmed assumption that the Hall itself is a perfect place to deal with the passing of Glory, Fate and Time, the scarring of Beauty itself; not to mention the evanescence of Fame correlated to names erased from the narration of the ‘Victors’, whoever they may be.
The beautiful images of archetypical female graces, placed all around the hall right at the beginning of the vaults, have been devastated by the Allied bombs in WWII and turned into silent, stunned and disfigured witnesses to the destruction of their home, the neoclassical palace transformed to accommodate the needs and wishes of Maria Theresia of Habsburg, one of the greats among the Ancien Regime’s sovereigns.
In 1951 they would see the passage of Guernica, one of Picasso’s seminal works and a masterpiece recounting the massacre in the little Basque town ravaged by German and Italian bombs: what better place to feel the weight and consequences of this other catastrophe, through the simultaneously cathartic distance and utmost intensity given by the artistic expression?
In the case of Kiefer’s works about female alchemists, the sense of ‘loss’ is certainly present but in a much subtler way: it deals with the absence of faces and words, the fact that these women’s works and lives have been mostly relegated to a secondary plane of the alchemical and cultural discourse. Some have perceived the canvases as somewhat close to experimental scenography, a decorative work caught in the balance ‘more evoked than resolved’ between ‘annihilation and rebirth’ (Flavio Arensi, Avvenire.it): truth be told, resolution clearly wasn’t in Kiefer’s plans and these are not the polarities at work in the series.
The abstraction of the faces is an important example of this tendency: even if we have a portrait of Caterina Sforza, for example, Kiefer refuses to give us an exit from the Limbo in which these figures abide. Their isolation from the mainstream is rendered through the removal of elements that could give us closure and reassurance, like a face, a distinction, a quirk taken from an anecdote: it is the eternal and constant element of their aspiration that must prevail.
The result is a low-key exaltation, most evidently expressed in the flying figures soaring above a tumultuous and scorched soil and a calm, abstract seascape, into a golden sky: some of these flying alchemists (except for the jumping Kleopatra) have a cloak that mostly works as a ritual mask for the face, eliminating the individuality in order to better accomplish the ritual of ascension, but always as a sort of artificial wings, similar to those of a butterfly or a bat. This sub-group adamantly shows the tendency to push the medium towards the materiality of relief and the insertion of real plants within the paintings really is a decisive contribution.
A similar approach can also be found in the most ethereal and pacified work, Madame d’Orbelin, which isn’t a part of the aforementioned subseries. This last painting also stands in stark contrast to the mania transpiring from Anne Marie Ziegler. The failed alchemist not only is, at the same time, the most realistic one because of the pose, but also the plastic representation of the spiritual and mental cul-de-sac originated from an unfortunate alchemical hybris: this feeling of enclosure is remarked by her canvas, glued to the bigger one of the whole piece.
Visiting the exhibition, the first half is clearly the most resolved and powerful, mainly due to the composition of the pieces, the valorization given by the location and the tendency towards the physicality of sculpture that almost pushes us to talk about ‘panels’ or ‘bas-reliefs’ more than paintings.
The second section is made up of canvases fully covered in golden leaf, splashed with the effects of emulsions and electrolysis just like the previous works: the most harmonious paintings are Alathea Talbot Howard and Margaret Cavendish, Venetia Stanley, because of the better interaction between their poses, the format and the verticality of the composition.
The first work takes a contemplative note, as if the lonely alchemist tried to scry a figure forming in a fumigation rising above her; the second piece works with a recognizable neoclassical iconography, as these two aristocrats are described as a couple of female Atlases: nonetheless, the globe they’re holding also looks like an alchemical cauldron, from which a more subtle substance rises upward (the white drops of the albedo phase, the red clump of the rubedo and the gold bubble right under the names) and a darker material flows down (the black stains between the figures, indicating the denser material of the nigredo).
These two works are at the same level of the best ones exposed in the Caryatides’ Hall, not just for the composition and the multiplicity of the interpretations, but also for their poses, whereas the other pieces of this second block strike us as rigid: the heads and figures of the other golden canvases seem way too stiff, especially if compared to the organic flows of the emulsions.
What lingers at the end of the exhibition is certainly the capture of a need for elevation. In fact, we don’t see a lot of the utensils and the chemical side of these women’s research, if not in a concentrated, abstract form; nor the planetary symbols which could be found in the old manuscripts of the practitioners: this approach would have limited Kiefer’s exploration too much. Instead, we deal with mental and spiritual landscapes, some elements taken from nature and used both as means to an end and symbols in themselves.
The main reason behind The Alchemists may be a homage but Kiefer’s objective seems to be more empathetic than celebratory and that’s the component that grants success to this enterprise.
