Adrián Villar Rojas


Adrián Villar Rojas is an Argentinian sculptor known for his elaborate fantastical works which explore notions of the Anthropocene and the end of the world. In his dream like installations he uses aspects of drawing, sculpture, video and music to create immersive situations in which the spectator is confronted with ideas and images of their imminent extinction.
Villar Rojas studied Fine Arts at the University of Rosario, Argentina. He works with a production team that travels to form a nomadic studio for each new project to whom he refers to as his "theater company". His works are predominantly destroyed at the end of each exhibition yet somehow they remain alive though remnants that are carried over into subsequent works.

Biography

Adrián Villar Rojas' work has been exhibited at the Louvre Museum, MoMA PS1, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, the High Line, Moderna Museet, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kunsthaus Bregenz, the National Observatory of Athens and the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. He has also participated in the New Museum Triennial, documenta 13 the 9th Shanghai Biennale in 2012; the 12 and 14 Istanbul Biennale in 2011 and 2015 and the 12th Biennale of Havana, Cuba, the 12th Sharjah Biennale in UAE in 2015 and the 6th Marrakesh Biennale in 2016.
In 2014 Villar Rojas represented Argentina at the 54th edition of the Venice Biennale with The Murderer of Your Heritage, a large scale installation located in the Artigliere in Arsenale. His project consisted of a group of oversized site-specific sculptures made of clay over a framework of cement, burlap and wood.
Vilar Rojas' work The Most Beautiful of All Mothers was exhibited offshore in the Sea of Marmara off the island of Büyükada and in front of the Turkish home in exile of Leon Trotsky as part of the 2015 Istanbul Biennial. His effort was the most talked about work on social media of any effort at the exhibition.
In 2017 he was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for a sculptural installation for its ongoing series of exhibitions of contemporary works on the institution's roof. Therein Vilar Rojas created The Theater of Disappearance which is a dinner party like mash up sculptural outlay reproducing digitally scanned objects from the museum's own collection. This was one of four exhibitions sharing the same title, all of which opened within 2017 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Vorarlberg, Austria, at the National Observatory of Athens, commissioned and organized by NEON Organization, and the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles.
For the project in Athens, Villar Rojas, commissioned by NEON Organization, a non-profit whose space is the city itself, disrupted the grounds of the National Observatory of Athens which sits atop the Hill of the Nymphs. The whole area underwent a transformation – architectural, horticultural and emotional. The exhibition was curated by Elina Kountouri, Director NEON.The artist selected 46,000 different plants from 26 different species creating an intensely fertile area that gave way to a barren, polemical zone utilizing for the first time a neglected space of the Hill. Sculptural installations inside eleven variously sized vitrines expose the brutality of years of conquest and expansion and our quest for colonizing new territory on earth and beyond.

Awards