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# Prado VR show ‘Masterpieces’ takes visitors inside paintings that can’t leave Madrid
- URL: https://www.urgentmatter.press/prado-vr-show-masterpieces-takes-visitors-inside-paintings-that-cant-leave-madrid/
- Published: 2026-10-21T01:30:10.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-21T01:30:10.000Z
- Description: The experience ends with a dance party inside Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.
- Author: Adam Schrader
- Tags: Science and Technology, #public-access

A virtual reality show built around five Museo del Prado paintings that its creator said cannot leave Madrid is making its U.S. debut at Powerhouse Arts in Brooklyn.

“Instead of making the museum and pieces travel, make people travel to this kind of imaginary museum,” Carla Prat, the Madrid-based creative lead at ACCIONA Cultura who pitched the show to the Prado, told Urgent Matter.

ACCIONA Cultura’s “Masterpieces: A Virtual Experience of the Museo del Prado” opened October 1 [at Powerhouse Arts in Gowanus](https://powerhousearts.org/?ref=urgentmatter.press). It runs Wednesday through Sunday until December 20.

Visitors wear VR headsets and take a roughly 30-minute walk through computer-generated galleries and paintings, guided by a museum guard on his last night shift before retirement.

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The five paintings are Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel’s *The Sense of Sight* (1617), Diego Velázquez’s *Las Meninas* (1656), Paolo Veronese’s *Venus and Adonis* (around 1580), Francisco de Goya’s *Witches’ Sabbath* (1820–1823) and Hieronymus Bosch’s *The Garden of Earthly Delights* (1490–1500).

I went on October 14 with my 2-year-old son, Jack. It is among the best VR and immersive shows I have seen, and I have seen and written about a lot of them. The visuals are stunning.

Powerhouse Arts recommends the show for ages 8 and up. Organizers said Jack was welcome if I held him, so I carried him or held his hand. He didn’t seem scared but probably wondered why his dad was walking around with weird glasses on.

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“I was blown away by its perfect balance between art history and entertainment. It is the best VR experience I have ever had,” Eric Shiner, president of Powerhouse Arts, said in emailed answers to questions from Urgent Matter. “And I was not a fan of VR in general, until now.”

Prat said the idea grew out of an immersive Frida Kahlo exhibition ACCIONA Cultura took on tour. Moving that show was hard, and Kahlo made few works, many held in private collections.

The team started talking about a digital museum and took the idea to the Prado, focusing on works the museum will not lend.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/3c/26/3c26cf7a-2384-4a8d-82e1-f44702177698/content/images/2026/10/Detail-of-visitors-engaging-with-Bosch-1.jpg)

Visitors are seen engaging with Hieronymus Bosch’s **The Garden of Earthly Delights* within the VR headset. Photo courtesy of ACCIONA Cultura

“Why would we do a 360 VR recording of the museum? It doesn’t make much sense,” Prat said. “We wanted to make it cinematographic VR, like a video game.”

Prat said the museum frames a story about the visitor’s journey through the paintings.

“I didn’t want someone telling you what you should know about art. I come from the museum world. I work in museums, and I’m a museologist. I know these things, but I didn’t want that,” Prat said.

“If you have the chance to look at it, like, you get completely mesmerized with all the scenes. So I was like, imagine you could be inside, like, inside that painting,” she said of *The Garden of Earthly Delights*.

The Prado let ACCIONA Cultura use its name and images, and the museum’s director agreed to bring in Alejandro Vergara, the Prado’s head of conservation of Flemish painting and Northern Schools. Vergara helped cut a longer list of paintings down to the final selection and shaped how each one is explained, she said.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/3c/26/3c26cf7a-2384-4a8d-82e1-f44702177698/content/images/2026/10/Museum-guard-s-office-within-the-VR-experience.jpg)

A view of the museum guard's office at the start of the experience. Photo courtesy of ACCIONA Cultura

Prat said the project took 12 to 15 months from pitch to opening, with seven to eight months of production. Most of the rest was spent pitching the concept to a museum where, she said, many people had never tried VR.

ACCIONA Cultura financed and owns the show and licenses it to venues, including Powerhouse Arts, Prat said. She did not say what it cost.

The company licensed and adapted existing video game software built for multi-user, location-based VR, Prat said.

“We didn’t want visitors to wear backpacks. We knew glasses are much better now, but we wanted super high-definition CGIs that would last at least three years,” she said.

The show premiered at the 2025 Next In Summit in Madrid in April and went to Shanghai and Chengdu, China, that summer, the company said in a press release. Prat said it has also run in Buenos Aires and Japan.

Prat said she pitched it to Shiner halfway through production, and that he came to the Madrid opening and told her he wanted it in New York.

The guard who narrates the show is named Teo. Prat said Vergara did not want a guard as the narrator at first.

“He was like, ‘No, no, he cannot tell you about the artworks,’ and I was like, ‘But I disagree, because he spends so many hours in the paintings,’” Prat said.

“I know curators are art lovers, for sure, it’s their job, but I mean, I think it makes sense to have someone that is, maybe more down-to-earth,” she said.

Vergara came around and recommended a book, she said: J.M. Coetzee’s *The Museum Guard*, a short story the Nobel Prize-winning author wrote in 2023 as the first resident of Escribir el Prado, the museum’s residency for writers. Prat said it became a reference for Teo.

Prat said a team wrote the script in-house, including Santiago Cardelús, a scriptwriter who has worked for Netflix and on television series. An actor named Brendan voices Teo.

I found the narration poetic. It feels like the opening of a video game, and the guard’s room at the start is the show's most interactive part. You can spin a globe, among other things.

After the guard’s room, the interaction thins out. There is a magnifying glass and a torch in the Rubens and Brueghel scene, and a fish you can touch, Prat said.

She said more interactive elements would have strained the headsets and slowed the crowd. Visitors share the floor and walk over the same physical areas, but each person sees a different scene and nobody sees anyone else, she said.

I wanted to linger. Several times I wished for a bench to sit on and take in the visuals, but the screen went dark and blinked until I walked to the next dot.

“For me, that’s not a decision I support. I know why it happens and that we had to include it, but it’s because you have to move,” Prat said.

Prat said she raised the pacing with the technical team.

“It’s like, can we make it longer? No, Carla, because then people stay longer,” she said.

Prat said physical benches would get in the way of visitors crossing the same floor. Virtual ones cause trouble too. At a VR experience she visited in Paris, people sat on virtual benches and fell, so developers had to add “do not sit here” signs.

“I thought, like, oh my god, this destroys the reality at all, right?” Prat said.

Thomas Roussel, a French composer who Prat said has worked with Pharrell Williams on music for his runway shows, wrote the original score.

To me, the music fit the art, and each scene topped the last, especially the final two—the Goya and the Bosch.

In the Goya, Prat said, “you enter this dark scene,” and “you have to feel anguish.”

The score then builds to the Bosch. Prat said her team always thought the central panel of *The Garden of Earthly Delights* looked like a rave, full of figures that looked like dressed-up animals.

“It’s a party,” she said.

The visual reference for that scene was a Daft Punk video, and the team wanted people to dance, Prat said. I found myself dancing.

“You should leave the experience feeling good. That was always the intention,” Prat said.

After the headsets come off, visitors can make their own museum dioramas in a space Powerhouse Arts added to give the show “a unique Powerhouse spin,” Shiner said. Jack and I enjoyed the diorama table and probably spent another 30 minutes on the craft.

Powerhouse Arts is better known as a place where artists fabricate work in ceramics, textiles, print and wood. Shiner said the new organization has been running “a wide variety of beta tests” to see which audiences respond to its exhibitions, fairs and programs, and brought in the VR show to see “if folks might want to experience art in a new way.”

Shiner described attendance since the opening as “Steady!” and said Powerhouse Arts will decide whether to host more shows like it “after final tabulations are counted at the end of the show’s run.”

Shiner said Powerhouse Arts hopes the show gives people easy access to art.

“If some of those folks want to learn more about how art is made and by whom, then we feel it has done its job!” he said.

A home version for headsets like the Apple Vision Pro would mean completely adapting the show, Prat said, because it was designed for groups walking through the same room at once.

“It’s a conversation we had. We haven’t had the time to explore it, honestly,” she said.

Timed tickets are $30 for adults; $20 for seniors 65 and older, veterans and military, and visitors with disabilities; $16 for students 13 and older with ID; and $8 for children 8 to 12.

Powerhouse Arts does not recommend the show for people prone to motion sickness or sensitive to flashing lights or sudden loud noises.

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