The Argentine artist Adrián Villar Rojas unveiled a brand new sculpture in Switzerland this month, co-commissioned by the artwork programme of Swiss watch producer Audemars Piguet and the Aspen Artwork Museum. Now on view at Audemars Piguet’s headquarters in Le Brassus to mark the watchmaker’s a hundred and fiftieth anniversary, the work will journey to Aspen subsequent spring for Villar Rojas’s solo exhibition on the artwork museum.
The untitled piece is a part of Villar Rojas’s sequence The Language of the Enemy, during which he examines the fraught relationships between species amid international disaster. The sculpture contains a bronze Triceratops cranium displayed on a fluorescent-lit white plinth overlooking the Jura Mountains within the Vallée de Joux, the historic centre of Swiss horology.
“Language is expertise that we use to handle and title issues, a software we use to speak,” Villar Rojas mentioned on the sculpture’s unveiling. “However what occurs when language isn’t sufficient to speak with another person? If you can not tackle this ‘different’? I believe that’s when battle seems. When you may’t actually talk, you begin to speculate on the intelligence of that individual. So language is the enemy.”
The form of Venus of Lespugue might be see on the right-side horn. Courtesy Audemars Piguet Modern
Rising from one of many fossil’s horns is a rendering of the Venus of Lespugue, a prehistoric feminine figurine found in a French collapse 1922. Scientists date the statuette to as early as 26,000 years in the past, making it one of many oldest types of figurative artwork identified. Villar Rojas imagines the ingredient as a speculative collaboration between Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens—a logo of “the very first thing somebody wished to make to say one thing to another person that was unimaginable to say in every other means”, he says, prompting questions in regards to the origins of creative expression.
The sculpture was produced utilizing digital modelling, which allowed Villar Rojas and his group to design each aperture present in a pure fossil earlier than the bronze was solid at a neighborhood Swiss foundry.
That is the primary time Audemars Piguet Modern, the corporate’s artwork programme, has premiered a fee at its headquarters. A number of workplaces within the spiral-shaped Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet overlook the set up. The model’s lengthy historical past with timekeeping aligns with Villar Rojas’s ongoing curiosity in “deep time”, an idea describing the huge, non-human scale of geological historical past.
In a lot of Villar Rojas’s earlier work, “deep time was at all times wanting in the meanwhile after extinction—imagining these worlds of what occurs when it’s the top of species, the top of human life”, says Audrey Teichmann, co-art curator at Audemars Piguet Modern. “Now we’re seeing a shift towards pre-history, towards the second earlier than arrival, and the hypothesis of an encounter.”
The work below development at a neighborhood foundry. Courtesy Audemars Piguet Modern
Teichmann declined to reveal the mission’s funds. In accordance with Morgan Stanley, Audemars Piguet generated an estimated SFr2.4bn (virtually $3bn) in 2024. Subsequent summer time, the sculpture might be transported to the Aspen Artwork Museum, the place Villar Rojas will stage an exhibition throughout two flooring of the museum.
“This work might be a part of our exhibition in Aspen, but it surely’s additionally related to an entire sequence of reveals Adrián has not too long ago offered—the Aichi Triennale, his exhibition in Seoul,” says Aspen Artwork Museum curator-at-large Claude Adjil. “For Adrián, exhibitions don’t start and finish; they type our bodies of labor that bleed into each other.”
Guests to Villar Rojas’s takeover of a decommissioned major college in Seto Metropolis, Japan, throughout the Aichi Triennale noticed an early glimpse of the brand new sculpture, which appeared within the wallpaper protecting the constructing’s inside. Though the piece imagines a distant, prehistoric state of affairs, Villar Rojas sees parallels with up to date anxieties.
“Have a look at what’s occurring in politics—I believe we should be utilizing expertise and language in our political and socioeconomic relationships in ways in which haven’t saved tempo with the velocity of change,” he says. “I’ve frustration with our species and our lack of creativeness. We live by way of an especially traumatic second.”
Adrián Villar Rojas: Untitled (The Language of the Enemy), till 31 March 2026, Audemars Piguet, Le Brassus, SwitzerlandAdrián Villar Rojas, 11 June-4 October 2026, Aspen Artwork Museum
