Image: Aspen Art Museum
'Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals' is on view from July 2, 2026, through April 11, 2027.
The exhibition occupies two floors of the museum. It is conceived as an evocation of both the geological and mythological formation of a cave.
In the exhibition’s framework, the cave functions as a space of double accumulation: it is geologically shaped through material deposition and mineral consolidation, and culturally layered with human projections, rituals, and symbolic activity.
The exhibition environment includes a series of cave materializations derived from prehistoric sites.
Villar Rojas’s large-scale, site-specific installations often appear to collapse space and time.
The exhibition explores the instability of what we call human, along with the systems—from mythology and mathematics to artificial intelligence—that people create to make an incomprehensible universe legible.
The project continues Villar Rojas’s long-held interest in how information, traditions, and species evolve and reckon with the prospect of erasure or extinction.
In a recent conversation published by Cultured, Villar Rojas and the exhibition’s curator, Claude Adjil, explore the ideas at the center of 'First Gods, Lost Animals'.
