BROOKLYN, NY.- Powerhouse Arts announces the New York premiere of Masterpieces: A Virtual Experience of the Museo del Prado, an immersive virtual reality exhibition developed by ACCIONA Cultura in exclusive collaboration with Madrid's Museo Nacional del Prado. Running from October 1 through December 20, the experience invites visitors into a multi-sensory reimagining of one of the world's greatest museums, including fantastical, in-depth explorations of the museum's most celebrated, and rarely traveled, masterpieces.
Billed as the first multi-user, location-based VR experience produced in collaboration with the Museo del Prado, Masterpieces does not attempt to recreate the Prado's galleries through the eyes of a curator or scholar; instead, it reenvisions the museum and its masterworks through the voice of a security guard on his final night shift before retirement. Delving into five of the museum's most iconic and iconographically distinct paintings—from Velzquez's acclaimed court portrait Las Meninas, to Goya's dark meditation in Witches' Sabbath, to Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights and its high-key vision of judgment day—the experience offers an intimate, personal perspective. His animated vision is fueled by time-earned appreciation and curiosity over decades of attention to these works, of service to the museum and its publics. In this way, Masterpieces highlights the often-unseen contributions and insights of museum workers, while raising the question of how original artworks might be experienced in our increasingly virtual world. Over the course of the 30-minute experience, the works shift from static canvases into three-dimensional and theatrical spaces, inviting audiences past their frames and into the expansive narrative worlds these paintings have contained for centuries.
The exhibition is, in part, a bridge to access the world's treasures. These extraordinary pieces, unlikely to ever leave the Prado due to conservation needs, are brought to life in an emotional immersive journey, driven by a commitment to making art more accessible. The Prado rarely lends its masterworks like The Sense of Sight by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel and strictly prohibits the loan of the other works in the experience, making a trip to Madrid the only way to encounter these masterpieces—until now.
Beyond access, the project asks a more existential question about what a museum experience can be when it is no longer tethered to the physical object. Masterpieces offers New York audiences, including many who might not otherwise walk into an art museum, an entry point that is at once educational and transportive.
The Five Iconic Works
Over the course of the experience, visitors journey through five iconic works from the Prado’s collection:
• The Sense of Sight, Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel, 1617
• Las Meninas, Diego Velzquez, 1656
• Venus and Adonis, Paolo Veronese, ca. 1580
• Witches’ Sabbath, Francisco de Goya, 1820–1823
• The Garden of Earthly Delights (Triptych), Hieronymus Bosch, 1490–1500
Alejandro Vergara, Senior Curator of Flemish and Northern European Paintings at the Museo del Prado, whose expertise and curatorial insight was invaluable to the development of the experience, states:
“We have chosen five works from the museum for this project, and we did so partly because they are all widely recognized and have been admired for centuries, each teaching us something different: [Las Meninas] a Spanish court painting, in this case; a piece from Rubens and Brueghel, The Sense of Sight, an allegory of the importance painting held for the nobility of the time; Bosch’s work, already highly popular during his lifetime, continues to captivate today; Veronese’s Venus and Adonis, a deeply passionate painting that conveys the poetic pain that art can express; and with Goya, we encounter painting at its most intense, [presenting] dreams, fears and the shadows of the human condition.”
Each gallery blends original storytelling, an original score, and richly designed 3D environments to draw visitors past the canvas and into the histories and symbolism each painting contains.
