Powerhouse Arts in Gowanus will debut a virtual reality art experience this fall that lets visitors walk through five masterpieces from Madrid's Museo Nacional del Prado without ever leaving Brooklyn. Masterpieces: A Virtual Experience of the Museo del Prado opens October 1 and runs through December 20, framing its 30-minute journey through the perspective of a security guard on his final night shift before retirement.
The experience was developed by ACCIONA Cultura in collaboration with the Museo Nacional del Prado, according to Brooklyn Eagle, which first reported the Gowanus dates. The full production credits run deeper: creative direction and CGI came from Barcelona studio Tigrelab, software integration was handled by Univrse, and composer Thomas Roussel wrote an original orchestral score for the piece.
Before landing in Gowanus, the show — originally produced under the title ART MASTERS: A Virtual Reality Experience — made its global debut at the NEXT IN Summit in Madrid in April 2025, according to ACCIONA Living & Culture. It then toured China with stops in Shanghai and Chengdu that June and July, before its October US premiere at Powerhouse Arts.
Five Masterworks, One Retiring Guard's Eyes
The Gowanus staging features Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas, Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, Francisco de Goya's Witches' Sabbath, Paolo Veronese's Venus and Adonis, and Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens's The Sense of Sight, per the Brooklyn Eagle's reporting and confirmed by Designboom. The Brooklyn Eagle describes the experience as spotlighting the least-traveled works from the Museo Nacional del Prado's collection.
That framing is not incidental. Central pieces like Las Meninas never leave the Prado due to strict physical conservation policies, according to the Los Angeles Times, which means VR and digital media remain one of the only ways international audiences can encounter them outside Madrid. The exhibition format sandwiches the core headset experience between two physical spaces — an introductory gallery on the Prado's history and an interactive post-show area — according to blooloop.
A Museum Squeezed by Its Own Popularity
The timing lines up with a crowding problem 3,600 miles away. The Museo Nacional del Prado logged a record 3.51 million physical visitors in 2025, prompting director Miguel Falomir to announce Plan Host in January 2026, a policy capping daily admission to ease room overcrowding, as reported by Time Out. Location-based VR tours like the one heading to Gowanus fit into a fast-growing industry: the global immersive art exhibition market was valued at $2.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $7.9 billion by 2034, according to market research firm Dataintelo.
Powerhouse Arts will pair the exhibition with accompanying programming, including conversations with artists, curators and cultural leaders about the evolving relationship between art and technology, per the Brooklyn Eagle. An opening night party is set for October 3, and the venue plans a staff art show in November.
From Squatter Commune to Cultural Landmark
The venue hosting the Prado's American debut has its own dramatic backstory. Powerhouse Arts occupies the former Central Power Station of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, built between 1901 and 1904 to power Brooklyn's streetcars, which sat abandoned after 1972 and earned the local nickname the Batcave as a squatter commune and illegal graffiti venue during the 2000s, according to CBS News.
Philanthropist Joshua Rechnitz bought the Gowanus property in 2012 for $7 million and funded an estimated $180 million transformation designed by Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron with PBDW Architects, opening the 170,000-square-foot nonprofit art fabrication facility in 2023, reports Untapped New York. The building has since become a fixture in the city's cultural and political conversations. Diya Vij, formerly the venue's Vice President of Curatorial and Arts Programs, was tapped by Mayor Zohran Mamdani in February to lead the city's Department of Cultural Affairs, and Powerhouse Arts also served as the backdrop for a Mamdani housing policy address in June.
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