Adrián Villar Rojas's solo show First Gods, Lost Animals, at the Aspen Art Museum 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 aeons 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—gods, art, mathematics—arise as adaptive technologies that render the world navigable. These systems extend human cognition across time: mythology operates as an early interpretive scaffold, mathematics formalises abstraction, and artificial intelligence marks the newest threshold in this lineage, externalising 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.
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