“L’image volée” (The Stolen Image) is a group show curated by artist Thomas Demand, occupying both levels of the Nord gallery at Fondazione Prada in Milan within an exhibition architecture designed by sculptor Manfred Pernice. It includes more than 90 works by over 60 artists from 1820 to the present, exploring how artists rely on pre-existing models and refer to existing imagery to make their own, questioning the boundaries between originality, conceptual inventiveness and the culture of the copy. The exhibition unfolds in three parts: the physical appropriation of an object or its absence, evidenced by works such as Maurizio Cattelan’s theft report for a claimed stolen artwork or Richard Artschwager’s Stolen Rug; the logic of appropriation within the creative process, from counterfeiting and Appropriation Art (Sturtevant’s Duchamp Man Ray Portrait) to the alteration of existing artworks (Martin Kippenberger’s coffee table made from a Gerhard Richter painting) and the use of postcards, photograms and archival images by artists such as Haris Epaminonda and John Stezaker; and the production of images that reveal hidden aspects of private or public life, from John Baldessari’s hidden-camera installation Blue Line (Holbein) to Sophie Calle’s The Hotel and Trevor Paglen’s photographs of the undersea cable infrastructure of mass surveillance. The book is illustrated with newly commissioned short stories by Ian McEwan and Ali Smith, essays by Russell Ferguson, Christy Lange and Jonathan Griffin, and contributions by Rainer Erlinger and Daniel McClean.