Aspen Art Museum presents Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals, an expansive solo exhibition of new site-specific work specially conceived for the museum by artist Adrián Villar Rojas.

Layering considerations of prehistoric cognition, geomythology, robotic fabrication, digital simulation, and collective world-building, First Gods, Lost Animals imagines the spaces and moments where symbolic thought and representation may have first emerged. The exhibition unfolds through rooms and interstitial corridors lit only by exit signs and artificial lighting and fabricated architectonic environments developed from meticulous archaeological and forensic research. 

Across these spaces, Villar Rojas explores the enduring human impulse to externalize thought, preserve memory, and create meaning. Developed in collaboration with a twelve-person team that traveled from Argentina, using some of the most advanced representational technologies available today, the exhibition considers how environments shape systems of belief, representation, and collective memory, asking what connects the earliest architectures of meaning to the institutions and technologies that structure contemporary life. 

“Adrián Villar Rojas has always been an artist of deep ambition, creating work that is staggering in both physical and intellectual scope. Created specifically for the Aspen Art Museum, First Gods, Lost Animals is a testament to what can be achieved when institutions let artists lead,” said Nicola Lees, Nancy and Bob Magoon Artistic Director and CEO of Aspen Art Museum. 

First Gods, Lost Animals takes its title from a recurring question in Villar Rojas's practice: how do we confront a universe we cannot fully understand? For the artist, gods, images, rituals, stories, and mathematics are all technologies developed to navigate uncertainty, mortality, and the limits of perception. For Villar Rojas, "Gods are what lost animals invent." Since 2004, Villar Rojas’s work has posited the question: “What if we could see and think of ourselves - humanity - from an alien perspective; detached, unprejudiced, even acultural? What if we could think of ourselves from the borders of our own completed path?” 

The exhibition opens with a new work co-commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, Untitled (from the series The Language of the Enemy). Cast in bronze and threaded with veins of gold, the sculpture takes the form of a life-size Triceratops skull. Carved into one of its horns is the Venus of Lespugue, a Paleolithic figurine created some 25,000 years ago and among the earliest known representations of the human body. Untitled (from the series The Language of the Enemy) condenses a long chain of transformations: a living creature becomes a fossil, the fossil a geological object, and the geological object an archaeological artifact. The Venus of Lespugue introduces a speculative moment in deep time in which the artifact is transformed into a symbolic object. In the present, the object then passes through digital scanning, computation, and fabrication before returning to the physical world as sculpture. Folding together extinct species, ancestral humans, and contemporary computational systems, the work stages a vast historical loop that runs from the earliest known acts of representation to the technologies that shape images and objects today. The sculpture ultimately traces an entangled evolutionary history of representation itself, collapsing millions of years of natural, cultural, and technological change into a single object that complicates conventional narratives of human exceptionalism.

On the lower ground level, visitors encounter a series of enlarged cave environments reconstructed from photogrammetric scans of sections of Lascaux and Chauvet, two of the most significant Paleolithic cave sites in Europe. Derived from extensive digital documentation and archaeological research, these spaces have been modeled, enlarged, fabricated, and reassembled within the museum. Stalactitic formations, mineral deposits, cavities, and eroded surfaces coexist with the traces of their own technological translation, creating environments that oscillate between geological formation and sculptural construction. Rather than reproducing the celebrated chambers associated with prehistoric painting, Villar Rojas focuses on peripheral areas where little or no symbolic activity has been identified or preserved, directing attention toward the uncertain threshold at which natural formations become images and material traces become carriers of meaning. 

Across the cave’s walls, Villar Rojas introduces subtle, fragile gestures through which meaning may have first entered the world: scratches, rubbings, accumulations of pigment, finger impressions, and nearly imperceptible marks capable of carrying memory, belief, and representations across tens of thousands of years. What emerges is neither archaeological reconstruction nor faithful reproduction, but the result of an extended sequence of translations in which the cave begins as geology, an environment largely indifferent to human existence. Over millennia, this environment is occupied, traversed, modified, and interpreted by different forms of life, including Neanderthals, Homo sapiens, and countless other species. Through these encounters, the cave becomes ritual, ritual becomes archaeology, archaeology becomes data, and data becomes sculpture. 

“There is something deeply recursive here: contemporary human cognition trying to simulate the environments in which symbolic cognition may first have emerged,” said Villar Rojas. “What interests me is not only the famous cave paintings of places like Lascaux or Chauvet, but the possibility that before those extraordinary images existed, there were much smaller and almost invisible gestures. Tiny markings. Hesitations. Early traces of symbolic behavior, perhaps it is self-exteriorization: an organism discovers that it can deposit an aspect of its interiority outside itself. Perhaps the first attempt by a human ancestor to externalize thought into matter.” 

As in Villar Rojas's most ambitious projects, First Gods, Lost Animals was realized over two years of intensive research, geometric analysis, virtual modeling, and engineering, followed by a three-month fabrication period. The exhibition unfolds as a singular environmental condition: Galleries have been left empty, the reception desk removed, and light allowed to circulate between floors and adjacent rooms, creating visual and atmospheric continuities that disrupt the museum's usual compartmentalization. Illumination throughout the exhibition is provided by emergency exit signs and a series of custom-built light cages. Removed from their usual functional context and distributed throughout the museum, the signs begin to appear as something other than instructions: rudimentary images of the human body in motion, contemporary pictograms whose simplicity recalls some of the earliest symbolic representations. The light cages function less as conventional sculptures than as luminous worlds unto themselves, generating shifting images through arrangements of flora, shadows, and translucent materials.  

In addition to First Gods, Lost Animals, 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 celebrate the ways artists forge new understandings of the world and expand our collective consciousness. Villar Rojas will receive the 2026 Lewis Family Art Award at the Museum’s annual ArtCrush Gala on July 31, 2026. 

Johnson Atelier is the Commissioning Partner of First Gods, Lost Animals.

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