Audemars Piguet Contemporary (APC) and the Aspen Art Museum (AAM) have co-commissioned a new sculpture by Adrián Villar Rojas that will be unveiled in November in the Jura Mountains before traveling to the latter institution for a multi-floor exhibition in 2026.
A press release stated that (Untitled) The Language of the Enemy “draws a parallel between paleontology and speculative memory” and “presents a fictionalised history in which an encounter with fossilized dinosaur remains might have sparked the earliest act of art-making.”
Rojas is an Argentinian sculptor represented by Marian Goodman Gallery who recently had work exhibited at the 21st Century Museum of Modern Art in Kanazawa, Japan and at the Pinault Collection in Paris.
The Jura Mountains are within the Vallée de Joux—a region which marks the French-Swiss border and contain limestone formations which housed the first-studied Jurassic fossils.
APC’s co-commission of Rojas’ (Untitled) The Language of the Enemy is the first time the dedicated art program for the luxury Swiss watch company has presented a commissioned artwork in that location—its hometown—and the first joint commission with Aspen Art Museum.
APC curator Audrey Teichmann told ARTnews that when the organization commissions work from an artist, they assist with inception, research, development, fabrication, press, other aspects of project management, and finding a partner institution, because it doesn’t have an exhibition space of its own.
“It can be legal advice when needed,” Teichmann said. “It’s a very custom-made process.”
APC said it also provides “continuous support” to the artists it commissions through its commitment to assist in a second exhibition. “We’ve got to realize that the one-shot support is not what is the most significant in terms of bringing a work to the attention of other curators, bringing a lot of audiences to broaden their horizons,” Teichmann said. “We need more exhibitions, and long-term, longer conversations.”
This support includes storage of the commissioned artwork between the first and the second exhibition. “When you support the production of the work, you can’t just bring something on the shoulders of the artist and not care about how they will sustain the condition [of the] work,” she said.
APC did not disclose to ARTnews a specific financial figure for the co-commission, but did say in a statement that there was a financial contribution, adding that both APC and the AAM “partake in financially and curatorially realizing the artwork.”
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