Adrián Villar Rojas, "Two Suns"

Working on a monumental scale has never hindered art-world success—quite the opposite, in fact—and Argentinian Adrián Villar Rojas is arguably one of the most adept at realizing gargantuan projects among younger artists today. More remarkably, he uses air-dried clay, a material guaranteed to eventually crack and crumble into dust. His work—a conservator’s nightmare if there ever was one—has depicted everything from Kurt Cobain’s mummified corpse to a futuristic space station. Here, he’s curtained off several discrete spaces, covering the floor of each with clay tiles embedded with detritus like crushed soda cans, cigarette butts and leaves. One room contains a prone classical statue, a sleeping giant that resembles Michelangelo’s David taking a nap. Acknowledging mortality’s inescapable grasp, Rojas uses the iconography of permanence to evoke our impermanent condition.