Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals

Adrián Villar Rojas, El fin de la imaginación_. Installation view, The Bass Museum, Miami, USA, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Jörg Baumann

Running from June 12 to October 4, 2026, across two floors of the Museum, Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals will evoke both the geological and mythological formation of a cave. In Villar Rojas’s approach, the cave functions as a space of double accumulation: geologically shaped through eons of material deposition and mineral consolidation, and culturally layered with human projections, rituals, and symbolic activity.

The exhibition is grounded in the premise that humans, as finite intelligences, confront a universe whose complexity far exceeds their cognitive scale. In this condition, symbolic tools arise—gods, art, mathematics—as adaptive technologies that render the world navigable. These systems extend human cognition across time: mythology operates as an early interpretive scaffold, mathematics formalizes abstraction, and artificial intelligence marks the newest threshold in this lineage, externalizing thought to meet increasing complexity.

Within this environmental transformation sits a new sculpture co-commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, Untitled (from the series The Language of the Enemy), a life-size triceratops skull. Currently on view in Le Brassus (Switzerland) until mid-March 2026, the work imagines a prehistoric meeting between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals as a possible moment when the first gestures of meaning or image-making passed between species. In this new work, Villar Rojas proposes a theoretical history that challenges prevailing anthropocentric narratives of human exceptionalism. While symbolic creation has long been framed as an invention of Homo sapiens, recent findings suggest that Neanderthals may have engaged in such practices before us. Here, the encounter becomes a site of transmission: what we consider the foundation of human culture may have been inherited from a now-vanished branch of the human lineage. In this view, the birth of art is not a triumph of our species but a gift from another.

Adrián Villar Rojas is curated by Claude Adjil, Curator at Large

Special thanks to Nicola Lees, Christine Navin, Daniel Merritt, Gemma Goette, Kevin Haynie, Simone Krug

Presenting a new sculpture co-commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum Museum and Audemars Piguet Contemporary

Aspen Art Museum exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund. Support for artists is made possible by the Beckmann Kotzubei Artist Residency Fund

Major support is provided by Aspen Art Museum Exhibition Circle, with special thanks to Daniel English, Nancy Magoon, H. Gael Neeson, Allison Rose, and Mary Zlot

General exhibition support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Visiting Artist Fund. Additional support is provided by Aspen Art Museum National Council

About the Artist
Adrián Villar Rojas was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1980. He lives and works nomadically. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2025); The Tank, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2022); The Bass, Miami (2022); Oude Kerk, Amsterdam (2019); Tank Shanghai, China (2019); The Geffen Contemporary at Moca, Los Angeles (2017); NEON at Athens National Observatory, Greece (2017); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2017); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017).

Participation in international group exhibitions includes A Time Between Ashes and Roses, Aichi Triennale (2025); Dance With Daemons, Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2024); New Directions May Emerge, Helsinki Biennial, Finland (2023); Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023); Portals, Hellenic Parliament + NEON, Athens (2021); Bruges Triennial, Belgium (2021); 12th and 13th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2020 and 2018); 2nd Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020); Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2020); Layers of Time, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019); 1st Riga Biennial, Latvia (2018); 14th and 12th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2015 and 2012); 12th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2015); 12th Sharjah Biennial, Kalba, United Arab Emirates (2015); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel and Kabul (2012); The New Museum Triennial, New York (2012); and 54th Venice Biennale, Argentina’s National Pavilion, Italy (2011).

Villar Rojas has been the recipient of numerous prizes such as Konex Award (2012 and 2022); the Sharjah Biennial Prize (2015); the Prix Canson, Paris (2015); the Zurich Art Prize at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv (2013); the 9th Benesse Prize in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); the Nuevo Banco de Santa Fe Scholarship for Young Artists (2006); and the First Prize National Art Biennial of Bahía Blanca, Argentina (2005). In 2020 he was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize.

His 2013 film, Lo que el fuego me trajo, screened at the Locarno International Film Festival 2013. His 2017 film trilogy, The Theater of Disappearance, screened at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival 2017.