Within the framework of the cultural dissemination policy promoted by UNESCO, and to the backdrop of decolonisation and the Cold War, Lima’s Universidad de San Marcos created the Museo de Reproducciones Pictóricas (the Museum of Pictorial Reproductions) in 1951, an archive operating as a colonial system to organise knowledge inside the West’s historical-cultural construction and the policy of international relations propelled in the wake of World War Two.

Vision of Western Painting is an installation through which Fernando Bryce (Lima, 1965) recreates this Museo de Reproducciones Pictóricas by virtue of photographic replicas of thirty-nine of its pieces, encompassing the instantly recognisable van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Manet’s The Fifer, Ingres’s The Grande Odalisque and Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The installation is completed with ninety-six drawings in which Bryce, in line with his usual method — “mimetic analysis”, hand-copying official documents, press images and political propaganda to offer non-linear views of history and re-examine power relations — reproduces letters and invoices taken from the institution’s archives to explore its history, which entered a new chapter when, in 1996, it merged with the Museo de Arte e Historia in today’s Museo de Arte de San Marcos.