Museum Exhibitions

Running from July 2, 2026, to April 11, 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. 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: First Gods, Lost Animals will be on view at the Aspen Art Museum from July 2, 2026, to April 11, 2027.

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Straighten Your Wig and Pray is the first museum survey dedicated to the work of Chicago-born artist Arch Connelly, a vibrant presence within New York’s East Village art scene of the 1980s. Spanning the late 1970s through 1993, the year of the artist’s death from AIDS-related complications, the exhibition offers the most comprehensive presentation of Connelly’s work to date.

Working across painting, sculpture, and collage, Connelly reimagined the visual vocabularies of Minimalism and Pop through a lavish and highly personal language of ornament, color, and craft. Drawing from the aesthetics of camp, Pattern and Decoration, and surrealism, his meticulously embellished objects bridge the exuberant spirit of the East Village with deeper reflections on beauty, fragility, and loss. Many works on view have not been publicly exhibited in more than three decades.

Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray will be on view at the Aspen Art Museum from June 12 to October 11, 2026.

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For the museum’s rooftop terrace, Kerstin Brätsch presents a site-specific installation centered on a new series of sculptural mosaic benches. Developed through the artist’s ongoing interest in artisanal techniques—including stained glass, marbling, and stucco marmo—the works translate painterly gestures into vivid fossil-like forms that appear at once geological and otherworldly.

Designed to accommodate living plants, the benches form a vibrant garden environment that will evolve throughout the seasons. Blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and landscape, Brätsch’s installation invites visitors to pause, gather, and experience the rooftop as a living extension of the museum’s exhibition program.

Kerstin Brätsch: Fossil Psychic Stone Mimicry (Aspen) will be on view at the Aspen Art Museum from May 20, 2026 to March 31, 2027.

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