Five Prado Paintings Take Up Residence in Brooklyn, Seen Through a Headset

Since October 1, New Yorkers have been able to see five Prado paintings without leaving the five boroughs. "Masterpieces," a virtual reality experience at Powerhouse Arts in Brooklyn, takes five of the museum's best-known canvases and recasts them in a new form. The visitor doesn't stand in front of a wall label. They put on a headset and walk into the picture. That is an unusual offer for a collecting audience. A great painting is normally something you encounter at a set distance, behind a rope, with a guard nearby. Here the five canvases become places to step inside rather than objects to step back from. The originals stay where they hang. What has come to Brooklyn is an interpretation of them. The setting fits. Powerhouse Arts is a working space for artists and fabrication, so a project that treats old pictures as something to be built and entered belongs there. For readers who follow how great works travel, whether by loan, sale or reproduction, this is another way for them to arrive: as an experience rather than a shipment.

With reporting from Artnet News.