Adrián Villar Rojas:
First Gods, Lost Animals

Adrián Villar Rojas, First Gods, Lost Animals, 2026. Detail view, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA, 2026. Courtesy the artist, Aspen Art Museum, kurimanzutto and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Jörg Baumann.

Running from July 2 to April 18, 2027, 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. 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.

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 the National Observatory of Athens, Greece (2017); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2017); and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017).

Participation in international group exhibitions includes A Time Between Ashes and Roses, Aichi Triennale (2025), Japan; Dance with Daemons, Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2024); New Directions May Emerge, Helsinki Biennial (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 Biennales, South Korea (2018 and 2020); 2nd Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020); Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2020); Layers of Time, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019); 1st Riga Biennial, Latvia (2018); 12th and 14th Istanbul Biennials (2011 and 2015); 12th Havana Biennial (2015); 12th Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2015); Documenta 13, Kassel and Kabul (2012); The Ungovernables, New Museum Triennial, New York (2012); and the 54th Venice Biennale, Argentine Pavilion (2011).

Villar Rojas has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Konex Award (2012 and 2022); Sharjah Biennial Prize (2015); Prix Canson, Paris (2015); Zurich Art Prize at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv (2013); 9th Benesse Prize at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); Nuevo Banco de Santa Fe Scholarship for Young Artists (2006); and the First Prize at the 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 Film Festival (2013). His 2017 film trilogy, The Theater of Disappearance, screened at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival (2017).

View the gallery guide

Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals is curated by Claude Adjil, Curator-at-Large.

Special thanks to Nicola Lees, Daniel Merritt, Kevin Haynie, Christine Egaña Navin, Gemma Goette, Adam Voss, and John Zinonos.

With thanks to Audrey Teichmann.

We wish to express our deepest gratitude to Adrián Villar Rojas and his studio team: Cindi Beltramone, Guillermina Borgognone, Francisco Castells, Malena Cocca, Noelia Ferretti, Matheus Frey, Germán Rodríguez Labarre, César Martíns, Guillermina Sgro, and Silvia Tabachnik.

On-site studio team: Ariel Barbé, Juan Barbieratti, Alejandro Cinalli, Matías Chianea, Javier Gamboa, Mimi Laquidara, Mariano Marsicano, Lali Taborda, and Juan Pablo Wingeyer.

Special thanks to Félix Rodríguez Borgognone.

Johnson Atelier is the Commissioning Partner of Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals.

Presenting a new sculpture co-commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum, Audemars Piguet, 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, Cecilia and Ernesto Poma, Katie and Amnon Rodan, Allison Rose, Gayle Stoffel, 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.