13 November 2025
Artist Adrián Villar Rojas unveils Untitled (From the Series The Language of the Enemy), a major new bronze work that imagines a moment from deep time. Co-commissioned by Aspen Art Museum and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the work reconsiders the origins of symbolic creation–language, art, ritual–not as a triumph of Homo sapiens alone, but as a shared inheritance across species. Presented in the Jura Mountains within the Vallée de Joux, the birthplace of Swiss horology and home to Audemars Piguet for nearly a century and a half, the commission marks a special moment in the brand’s 150th anniversary year, uniting its history with a forward-looking vision of creation and transformation.
Premiering in the Jura Mountains within the Vallée de Joux, the work is central to Villar Rojas’ multi-floor exhibition at Aspen Art Museum in summer 2026, where it will feature amongst a body of new site-specific works. Both institutions share a commitment to artistic research and to dialogues that traverse disciplines, histories, and geographies.
Untitled (From the Series The Language of the Enemy) takes the form of a life-sized triceratops skull, from which a human figure—the prehistoric Venus of Lespugue, one of the earliest known examples of figurative art—emerges as though carved from the bone itself. This hybrid organism collapses the boundaries between fossil and artifact, nature and culture, and evokes the uncertain beginnings of representational life.
Drawing on more than a decade of research for this work, Villar Rojas imagines a speculative collaboration between Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens, challenging received ideas of human exceptionalism. His work invites viewers to see coexistence not as an ethical aspiration but as a biological and historical reality, a transmission across time and a gift from one vanished lineage to another.
The work’s creation involved a close dialogue between digital modelling and material construction. Each fracture and cavity of the bronze was digitally composed to achieve the geological complexity of a natural fossil. Through this process, Villar Rojas connects computational design with the tactile intelligence of sculpture, suggesting that technology, like evolution, is another way matter imagines itself anew.
In ‘The Language of the Enemy’, the ‘enemy’ resides – and is reproduced – through language. ‘Enemy’ is the word we use for those whose world collides with ours. It is through language that we name and divide, and within language that the memory of conflict endures. I speak Spanish – the language of the enemy, the one that once named and conquered the land where I was born.
Adrián Villar Rojas
Artist
Adrián Villar Rojas, "Untitled (From the Series The Language of the Enemy)", 2025. Installation view, Audemars Piguet; Le Brassus; Switzerland © courtesy of the artist, Aspen Art Museum, Audemars Piguet Contemporary and Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen. Photographed by Jörg Baumann.
Installed amid the valley’s limestone terrain, the sculpture resonates with the region’s deep-time strata, where sediment, fossil, and invention converge. In Aspen, its second presentation will echo the surrounding mountains shaped by glacial histories, inviting reflection on the slow, intertwined processes of nature and human imagination.
This marks the first time Audemars Piguet Contemporary has premiered a commission in the Vallée de Joux, and the first joint commission with Aspen Art Museum. Both Aspen Art Museum and Audemars Piguet Contemporary share a commitment to supporting artists in research and creation, fostering imaginative thinking for global audiences.
Adrián Villar Rojas’ Untitled (The Language of the Enemy) will be on view in Le Brassus from 13 November until 15 March 2026, followed by a second presentation at Aspen Art Museum as part of a multi-floor exhibition of new site-specific works .
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Adrián Villar Rojas imagines a theoretical history that blends palaeontology and the first recorded instances of human creativity, calling us to consider how art leads us to a better understanding within and between individuals. Adrián’s practice is rooted in a form of collective production which we recognise in our own approach at Audemars Piguet Contemporary—one that values collaboration, dialogue, and unwavering attention to process and materiality.
Audrey Teichmann
Curator, Audemars Piguet Contemporary
Adrián Villar Rojas was born in Rosario, Argentina in 1980. He lives and works nomadically. Villar Rojas has been the recipient of numerous awards including Sharjah Biennial Prize, awarded by the Sharjah Art Foundation (2015), The Zurich Art Prize at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv (2013); the 9th Benesse Prize in the 54th Venice Biennale, (2011); the Nuevo Banco de Santa Fe Scholarship for Young Artists (2006); and the first prize in the Bienal Nacional de Arte de Bahía Blanca at the Contemporary Art Museum of Bahía Blanca, Argentina (2005). In 2020 he was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize.
Recent solo exhibitions include Art Sonje Center, Seoul, South Korea (2025); Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2022); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, (2022); Tank Shanghai, China (2019); the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada (2018); The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles (2017); NEON Foundation at Athens National Observatory, Athens (2017); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2017) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017); the Moderna Museet, Sweden (2015); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2013); the Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2013); and the Musée du Louvre, Paris (2011).
Participation in international group exhibitions include Aichi Triennial, Seto, Japan (2025); Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order, Wiels, Brussels (2025); Machine Love: Video Game, AI and Contemporary Art, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2025); Dance With Daemons, Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2024); Helsinki Biennial, Finland (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 Biennale, South Korea (2020 and 2018); 14th and 12th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2015 and 2012); 12th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2015); 12th Sharjah Biennial, Kalba, United Arab Emirates (2015); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel and Kabul (2012); and 54th Venice Biennale, Argentina’s National Pavilion, Italy (2011).
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