The Furnace of Memory: Anselm Kiefer's The Alchemists.
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In The Alchemists, Anselm Kiefer does not merely assemble paintings - he orchestrates a resurrection. The exhibition unfolds less as a sequence of works than as a field of transformations, where history, material, and myth are subjected to slow heat until they begin, almost reluctantly, to speak again.
At its core lies a constellation of thirty-eight women who lived between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period - physicians, herbalists, philosophers, experimenters, and cosmological thinkers whose inquiries quietly intersected with what would later be called science. Their laboratories were rarely public. Knowledge was distilled in kitchens, cloisters, court chambers, and improvised workrooms. Like annotations in the margins of medieval manuscripts, their insights accompanied official history rather than entering it.
Kiefer approaches these figures not as subjects of recovery but as catalysts. His paintings refuse the conventions of portraiture: bodies surface from dense material strata as though emerging from geological time, faces appearing and dissolving in the same gesture. Identity is not stabilised; it flickers. Each work operates less as depiction than as invocation - a visual séance in which biography becomes atmosphere and presence replaces likeness.
Alchemy, long central to Kiefer’s imagination, provides both grammar and method.
Historically, alchemy was never solely a precursor to chemistry; it was a metaphysical technology concerned with the transformation of matter, language, and perception. Kiefer’s canvases function similarly. Pigments oxidise, straw embeds itself into layers of ash, surfaces crack, metals warp. The works continue to change, as though refusing the finality of completion. They do not represent transformation; they enact it.
Lead occupies a privileged role in this material cosmology. Associated with Saturn, melancholy, and the inertia of base matter, it historically symbolised both weight and potential - the substance awaiting transmutation. In Kiefer’s hands, lead becomes archival: dense with time, resistant to forgetting, yet perpetually poised for metamorphosis. The metal seems to remember what the historical record omitted.
The setting intensifies this alchemical logic. Installed in the Sala delle Cariatidi at Palazzo Reale, the works enter a hall already inscribed with rupture. Bombed during the Second World War and deliberately preserved in its wounded state, the room operates as a chamber of European memory. Here, architecture itself appears as a damaged body. The juxtaposition is not incidental: the scarred caryatids, burdened with structural weight, mirror the historical burden borne by the women Kiefer invokes. Stone and image confront one another, destruction facing the possibility of reconstitution.
This dialogue transforms the exhibition into something closer to a historical experiment. Rather than presenting these figures as victims reclaimed by belated recognition, Kiefer positions them within a longer genealogy of inquiry. Modern science, in this framing, emerges not from a single intellectual lineage but from dispersed practices, hidden experiments, and knowledge cultivated at the edges of legitimacy. Progress, the exhibition suggests, does not advance like a clean architectural line; it spreads like mycelium - subterranean, adaptive, and resistant to erasure.
There is also a subtle self-portrait embedded in the project. Kiefer has often described the artist as one who works among ruins, attempting to shape meaning from fragments left by catastrophe. The women he paints occupied an analogous terrain: excluded, mistrusted, yet engaged in processes whose consequences would far exceed their moment. The Alchemists thus becomes not only a meditation on forgotten proto-scientists but a reflection on the act of making meaning under conditions of historical noise.
What ultimately distinguishes the exhibition is its refusal of closure. These works do not restore a stable past; they activate an unstable one. Like the cryptic diagrams of alchemical manuscripts, they invite reading rather than resolution. Matter remains in flux, memory remains unsettled, and transformation remains ongoing.
Presented in Milan from 7 February to 27 September 2026, the exhibition situates Kiefer’s meditation on knowledge, transformation, and historical erasure within one of Europe’s most symbolically charged civic interiors. In this setting, the paintings resonate not only as images but as acts of historical reactivation - reminders that history behaves less like a finished record than like a reaction that continues, quietly, beneath the surface.
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Words by AW.
Photo courtesy of Ela Bialkowska.
