Masterpieces: A Virtual Experience of the Museo del Prado is at Brooklyn’s Powerhouse Arts until 20 December 2026 — a 30-minute free-roam virtual reality installation that turns classical paintings into three-dimensional, navigable environments you explore together.
Created by ACCIONA Cultura in exclusive collaboration with Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado, curated by Alejandro Vergara, the Prado’s Head of Conservation of Flemish Painting and Northern Schools.
The five works, and why these five
- Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel — The Sense of Sight
- Diego Velázquez — Las Meninas
- Paolo Veronese — Venus and Adonis
- Francisco de Goya — Witches’ Sabbath
- Hieronymus Bosch — The Garden of Earthly Delights
And the reason given for the project’s existence, which is more honest than the usual immersive-exhibition rationale: several of these masterpieces rarely travel or cannot leave Madrid.
That is a real argument rather than a marketing one. Las Meninas does not leave the Prado. The Garden of Earthly Delights does not leave the Prado. If you are in Brooklyn, the alternatives are a flight or a reproduction — and a navigable reconstruction is a genuinely different third option, not a substitute pretending to be the thing.
The selection is also well made for the medium. Bosch and Goya are the obvious wins — Garden of Earthly Delights is already a scene you want to get closer to, with hundreds of incidents that reward inspection at a scale no gallery viewing distance permits. The Sense of Sight is the clever inclusion: a painting of a room full of paintings, which in VR becomes a room full of paintings you can walk through. And Las Meninas is the hard one, because its whole subject is the geometry of looking — where the painter stands, where the mirror is, where you are. Reconstructing it dimensionally either illuminates that or destroys it.
Free-roam and multi-user are the technical claims
Two phrases in the description carry most of the engineering.
Free-roam means untethered walking in real space, with the virtual environment aligned to a physical room — not a seated or standing-still experience with teleportation. That requires tracking a group across a large volume reliably, and it is the thing that makes a VR installation feel like a place rather than a headset.
Multi-user means you see each other. For an art-viewing experience that is the substantive design decision, because looking at paintings is social. The standard failure of museum VR is that it isolates — you put on a headset in a room full of people and are alone inside it. ACCIONA’s framing is explicit about avoiding that: an intimate, shared sensory journey, turning passive viewing into something you do together.
The combination also sets the real constraint: a 30-minute shared free-roam experience is a throughput problem, which is why this is a ticketed installation in a dedicated space rather than a download.
The security guard
The experience is guided by the voice of a fictional security guard on his final night shift before retirement, with visitors travelling through an imaginary museum where the canvas opens into a multi-user digital environment.
This is a better framing device than it has any right to be, and worth noting because narrative framing is where most immersive art experiences fail. The alternatives are an authoritative art-historian voice, which turns the thing into an audio guide, or no voice at all, which leaves visitors wandering without a reason to look at anything.
A night guard is the one person who has a legitimate, non-expert, deeply familiar relationship with these specific paintings — someone who has stood in front of them for decades without being a scholar, in an empty building, at night. It gives the piece permission to be affectionate and observational rather than instructive, and it explains both why the museum is empty and why you are allowed to move.
ACCIONA Cultura’s track record
This is the project’s latest international iteration after Madrid, Buenos Aires, Tokyo and Shanghai, and sits in a portfolio that includes the Grand Egyptian Museum and New York’s Hip Hop Museum.
Worth knowing because it places the work in a specific category: not an artist’s VR piece but institutional immersive production, the discipline that builds permanent museum installations. The strengths and limits of that are predictable — academic curatorship, archival accuracy, high production values, and a tendency toward reverence. designboom’s description of the Powerhouse Arts installation as “a live architectural laboratory” is doing some lifting, but the underlying point stands: this is a physical-digital hybrid space, not a headset handed to you in a lobby.