Álvaro Urbano: Helen

Museo Jumex presents Helen, a solo exhibition by Álvaro Urbano (Madrid, 1983). Bringing together the stories of artists Helen Fowler O'Gorman, Helen Escobedo, and, through them, architect Juan O'Gorman, the exhibition creates an immersive site-specific space where different temporalities and memories converge around Casa Cueva, one of the landmarks of modern Mexican architecture. Rather than approaching the site as a fixed architectural icon, Helen unfolds through the intertwined lives, memories, and material traces that have shaped its history across generations.

Urbano conceives this architecture as an almost oneiric space where house and landscape dissolve into one another. Within this setting, vegetal forms emerge as active protagonists, inhabiting fictional worlds that unfold through their encounters with the viewer. In Helen, Casa Cueva stands as a silent witness, bearing the traces of accumulated time and transformations that have continually reshaped it.

The exhibition evokes a material atmosphere that recalls both the archaeological ruin and the dreamlike aura that has long shrouded the history of Casa Cueva in mystery. This atmosphere emerges through Fowler O'Gorman's botanical illustrations Mexican Flowering Trees and Plants, references to Juan O'Gorman's petro-murals, and allusions to Escobedo's art. These material translations stem from Urbano's careful research process, through which traces and reminiscences of Casa Cueva are transformed into sculptural forms. Instead of presenting a historiographical account, these presences operate as narrative threads that overlap and resonate with one another, like the layered strata and murmurs of the many stories that constitute Casa Cueva.

Published along side of the exhibition, the artist's book brings together essays by researchers Gina Cebey and Adriana Sandoval, documentation of the installation at Museo Jumex, archival photographs of Casa Cueva from the Manuel Toussaint Photographic Archive at UNAM's Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (IIE), and excerpts from Helen Fowler O'Gorman's Mexican Flowering Trees and Plants. Helen is accompanied by a public program of workshops and public talks presented at Museo Jumex from October 16, 2026, through February 7, 2027.

The exhibition forms part of the Museo Jumex’s autumn program which also includes Richard Prince: Tell Me Everything and Raúl Silva: Gateway. 

The exhibition is curated by Rosela del Bosque, Associate Curator, and Carolina Estrada García, Curatorial Assistant, Museo Jumex.

Álvaro Urbano is a Madrid-born and Berlin-based artist whose site-responsive practice involves an archeology of desires and past intentions. By creating atmospheres that replicate specific spaces and architectural gestures, the artist excavates the narratives that are embedded in these built bodies. Urbano borrows strategies from theater and filmmaking–such as lighting, sound and costumes–in order to create immersive environments that unfold in consecutive scenes or sequenced chapters. He uses different media to generate situations that approach liminal and dreamlike dimensions transforming the exhibition space into a vessel of phantasms and apparitions. Formally trained as an architect, one of the approaches that recurs in Urbano’s practice is an affective response to the built environments. The exercise of re-creating and re-framing architecture (and twentieth-century architecture in particular) becomes an intimate exploration of the subjectivity of other artists and the social context in which these spaces were considered as functional, innovative, or condemned to oblivion.