Adrián Villar Rojas challenges human exceptionalism in major Aspen Art Museum exhibition
Portrait of Adrián Villar Rojas. Photo: Seowon Nam. Courtesy of Art Sonje Center. 2025.
ASPEN, CO.—
Running from July 2 to April 11, 2027, across two floors of the Museum, Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals evokes 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.
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).
