Press Release
The Purloined Masterpiece. Images as Time Machines contrasts the conventional practice of collection display with a model that allows the Academy’s historical art collections – the Paintings Gallery, the Graphic Collection and the Plaster Cast Collection – to enter into conversation with contemporary works. The exhibition draws on these three rich collections, plucking out only a selection of the many possible pictorial programmes, typologies and allegorical formulas in order to loosely interweave these with works from other periods.