Álvaro Urbano: Helen

A vanished house in Mexico City becomes the starting point for Álvaro Urbano’s Helen at Museo Jumex. The exhibition revisits Casa Cueva, the home and garden created by architect Juan O’Gorman and inhabited with his wife, artist and botanically minded writer Helen Fowler O’Gorman. Built in the rocky landscape of Pedregal de San Ángel, the house brought architecture into close contact with its surroundings.

Urbano draws on Fowler O’Gorman’s 1961 book Mexican Flowering Trees and Plants, imagining the botanical world that once occupied the property. References to Juan O’Gorman’s stone murals and later interventions by artist Helen Escobedo add further layers to the presentation. Through an atmospheric architectural reconstruction, Urbano considers how a building’s history can survive through fragments, images, and the people who lived there.