Running from June 12 to October 4, 2026, 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.