Or: What medieval mystics understood about art that most people still miss
Here’s a question that might sound ridiculous at first: What do a 14th-century alchemist hunched over bubbling beakers and a contemporary curator installing an exhibition have in common?
More than you’d think, actually. And understanding this connection might just change how you see both art-making and art-presenting forever.
I realized something strange while installing the art & therapy exhibition this month. I’d spent months, if not years, researching Alain de Botton and John Armstrong’s radical idea of reorganizing galleries by emotional function rather than chronology — hope instead of Renaissance, memory instead of Modernism. But as I stood in Gallery Studio 21, watching seven artists’ works transform from individual pieces into a conversation about psychological fragility and strength, I wasn’t just presenting art. I was performing a kind of alchemy. Taking paintings, sculptures, and installations that already existed as complete artworks and transmuting them into something else entirely: a space where strangers could recognize their own struggles and feel less alone. The raw materials hadn’t changed, but everything about what they meant — and what they could do — had transformed completely. That’s when I started thinking about medieval alchemists and their obsession with transformation, albeit prompted by some additional reading I’d been doing.
above: photos from the exhibition art & therapy (September 9 – 20, 2025, Studio 21, Split, Croatia)
curator: Dora Derado Giljanović
photos: Srđan Tutić (Svarog Media)
The Great Art (No, Not That Kind of Great Art)
Alchemists called their practice “The Great Art” — not because they had inflated egos (though some probably did), but because they understood something profound about transformation. The popular image of alchemy as primitive chemistry obsessed with turning lead into gold misses the point entirely. Real alchemy was about understanding the fundamental processes of change: how one thing becomes another, how meaning shifts, how value is created and destroyed and recreated.
Sound familiar? It should.
The Artist as Alchemist: More Than Medieval Metaphor
Consider Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) — that infamous porcelain urinal he signed “R. Mutt” and submitted to an art exhibition. Critics have spent over a century analyzing this work, but here’s what’s most remarkable: Duchamp literally performed alchemy. He took a mass-produced, utilitarian object and transformed it into something else entirely — not through physical alteration, but through context, intention, and presentation.
Like an alchemist turning base metal into gold, Duchamp transformed a bathroom fixture into one of the most significant artworks of the 20th century. The raw materials stayed the same; everything else changed.
Contemporary artist Rachel Whiteread works similarly alchemical magic, casting the negative spaces inside and around objects. Her practice involves “one substance transforming into another” — she takes the absence of something and makes it present, visible, monumental. It’s transformation as literal as any alchemical process, just using plaster instead of mercury.
Enter the Curator-Alchemist
If artists are the primary alchemists, transforming raw experience and materials into meaning, then curators are the meta-alchemists — the ones who transform individual artworks into larger conversations, who create new compounds of meaning by combining different artistic elements.
This is where most people misunderstand what curators actually do. We don’t just write wall texts and arrange pretty displays (though we do that too). We perform a specific type of alchemy: we take individual artworks — each already the product of an artist’s transformative process — and create something entirely new through juxtaposition, context, and interpretation.
The Four Stages of Curatorial Alchemy
Traditional alchemy described four stages of transformation, each with its own color symbolism. Curatorial practice follows a remarkably similar process:
Nigredo (Blackening) — The Research Phase
This is the decomposition stage, where you break down everything you think you know. You immerse yourself in artists’ practices, historical contexts, theoretical frameworks. It’s messy, overwhelming, often depressing. You realize how much you don’t understand. This chaos is necessary — you can’t create new meaning without first dissolving old assumptions.
Albedo (Whitening) — The Clarification Phase
Patterns emerge from the chaos. Connections become visible. You start to see how different works might speak to each other, how individual practices relate to larger cultural conversations. The exhibition concept begins to crystallize — not as a predetermined thesis, but as an organic understanding of what these particular works, in this particular combination, might reveal.
Citrinitas (Yellowing) — The Synthesis Phase
This is where curatorial alchemy gets interesting. You’re not just presenting artworks; you’re creating a new entity that’s greater than the sum of its parts. The physical installation, the sequence of encounters, the written materials — all become part of a larger transformative experience. The exhibition space becomes your laboratory.
Rubedo (Reddening) — The Activation Phase
The philosopher’s stone is activated. Visitors enter the space and complete the alchemical process through their own encounters and interpretations. The transformation is no longer potential but actual — new understanding, new questions, new connections emerge that didn’t exist before.
Why This Matters (Beyond Cool Metaphors)
Understanding curating as alchemy isn’t just poetic license — it has practical implications for how we approach exhibition-making and how audiences engage with art.
For Artists: Recognizing curators as fellow alchemists can transform the collaboration. Instead of seeing curation as passive presentation of your work, you’re entering into a shared transformative process. The best exhibitions happen when artist-alchemists and curator-alchemists work together to create something neither could achieve alone.
For Audiences: Knowing that you’re entering an alchemical space — a place specifically designed for transformation — changes how you move through it. You’re not just looking at art; you’re participating in an ongoing process of meaning-making.
For Curators: Embracing the alchemical nature of what we do reminds us that we’re not neutral presenters or academic interpreters. We’re active agents of transformation, responsible for creating the conditions where new understanding can emerge.
The Real Magic
The most profound aspect of both alchemy and curating isn’t the transformation of materials — it’s the transformation of perception. Alchemists knew that changing how you see changes what you’re capable of seeing. The real “philosopher’s stone” isn’t a magical object; it’s a transformed way of understanding.
Great exhibitions work the same way. They don’t just show you art; they change how you’re capable of seeing art, culture, maybe even the world. Rachel Whiteread’s casts don’t just reveal negative space — they train your eye to notice absence and presence differently. Duchamp’s readymades don’t just challenge art world conventions — they rewire how you think about value, function, and meaning.
When curating works as alchemy, everyone leaves changed: the artworks (now in new dialogue with each other), the space (activated as a site of transformation), and the visitors (carrying new ways of seeing into the world).
That’s the real magic — not turning lead into gold, but turning unknowing, or at least passive exhibition-goers into people who see the world differently than they did an hour ago.
The next time you encounter an exhibition that stops you in your tracks, that makes you see familiar things in completely new ways, remember: you’ve just witnessed alchemy in action. The only question is whether you’ll let the transformation stick.
If you’re thinking about creating exhibitions that work this way — spaces designed for genuine transformation rather than just displaying art — let’s talk.