ADRIÁN VILLAR ROJAS TRANSFORMS THE ASPEN ART MUSEUM INTO GEOLOGICAL AND MYTHOLOGICAL CAVE

The Aspen Art Museum presents Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals, an exhibition spanning two floors of the museum, on view through April 11, 2027. Curated by Claude Adjil, the show evokes both the geological and mythological formation of a cave: a space of double accumulation, 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. 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.

At the center of the 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 encounter between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals as a possible moment when the first gestures of meaning or image-making passed between species. Villar Rojas proposes a theoretical history that challenges prevailing anthropocentric narratives: while symbolic creation has long been attributed to Homo sapiens, recent findings suggest that Neanderthals may have engaged in such practices before us. The birth of art would thus be not a triumph of our species, but a gift from another now vanished.

Adrián Villar Rojas (Rosario, Argentina, 1980) lives and works nomadically.

First Gods, Lost Animals is on view through April 11, 2027, at the Aspen Art Museum, 637 East Hyman Avenue, Aspen, United States.