ArtCrush Gala 2026

Honoree Adrián Villar Rojas’s practice can be understood as a system of world building: long term, collaborative projects that unfold as large scale, site specific environments, both imposing and fragile. Like von Neumann probes, self replicating machines theorized to travel through space, absorbing the materials and conditions of each new environment to generate transformed offspring, his works arrive in specific places, mutate through architecture, labour, climate, geology and institutional life, and emerge as divergent worlds. Through an intersectional use of sculpture, drawing, video, writing, architecture, scientific research, computational world building, parametric design, live digital simulations and performative traces, Villar Rojas builds complex environments in which objects, bodies, climates and fictions operate as part of the same evolving system, exploring the conditions of a humanity at risk, on the verge of extinction or already extinct, and tracing the multispecies boundaries of a post Anthropocene time in which past, present and future collapse into one another.

In tandem with this award, the Aspen Art Museum will present a solo exhibition, Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals, across two floors of the museum in summer 2026. Conceived around the cave as both geological structure and mythological device, the exhibition transforms the museum into a space of double accumulation: mineral formations produced across deep time and symbolic forms produced by human imagination.

Within this environment, a life size triceratops skull, Untitled (from the series The Language of the Enemy), co-commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, appears as both fossil and monument, linking extinction, inheritance and the non human origins of symbolic thought. Neither simply animal nor sculpture, it stands at the threshold where matter becomes meaning, asking whether art is not something humans invented, but one of the conditions through which humans became human at all. The work proposes art as first and foremost the possibility of meaning itself, an image of art before art.

Villar Rojas will also take part in this summer’s second annual festival for AIR, the museum’s flagship initiative of interdisciplinary collaborations, conversations and site specific artworks and performances that explore the most pressing issues of our time.

The gala takes place in a tented venue at Buttermilk. An accessible drop-off point is located adjacent to the entrance, and accessible restrooms are available on site. If you require mobility assistance, accessible seating, or other accommodations, please contact us at air@aspenartmuseum.org at least 48 hours in advance so we can evaluate and coordinate reasonable accommodations.