Adrián Villar Rojas
First Gods, Lost Animals

Running from July 2 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 is curated by Claude Adjil, Curator at Large.

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

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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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