Adrian Villar Rojas at The Roof Garden Commission

Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas has transformed the Cantor Roof at the Metropolitan Museum in New York with an intricate site-specific installation that uses the Museum itself as its raw material. Featuring detailed replicas of nearly 100 objects from The Met collection, The Theater of Disappearance encompasses thousands of years of artistic production over several continents and cultures, and fuses them with facsimiles of contemporary human figures as well as furniture, animals, cutlery, and food. Each object—whether a 1,000-year-old decorative plate or a human hand—is rendered in the same black or white material and coated in a thin layer of dust. The artist has reconfigured the environment of the Cantor Roof by adding a new pergola, a grand tiled floor, a bar, public benches and augmented planting throughout the space. The Met's own alphabet has even been incorporated into the graphic identity of the project. To realize this extensive work, the artist immersed himself in the Museum and its staff for many months, holding conversations with the curators, conservators, managers, and technicians across every department who contributed to the realization of this installation. This installation is open to the public during museum hours – weather permitting – through October 29, 2017. An exhibition catalogue accompanies this exhibition; it is the fifth book in the Roof Garden Commission series written by Beatrice Galilee (Daniel Brodsky Associate curator of Architecture and Design in the department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Met). It offers the artist's commentary and a unique visual diary of his thought process on the 2017 installation. For more information visit: http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2017/adrian-villar-rojas