Image: Álvaro Urbano, studio view, 2026. Courtesy of the artist; ChertLüdde, Berlin; Marian Goodman, New York and Paris; and Travesía Cuatro, Guadalajara, Madrid and Mexico City. Photo: Agustín Farías © 2026
Museo Jumex in Mexico City presents ‘Helen’, an exhibition by the Madrid-born artist Álvaro Urbano (b. 1983), from 16 October 2026 to 7 February 2027. The project is conceived as a tribute to Helen Fowler O’Gorman and to her lasting fascination with the plant life of Mexico’s central highlands.
At its centre is the Casa Cueva, the celebrated mid-20th-century house in the Pedregal de San Ángel that Helen and her husband, the architect Juan O’Gorman, designed, built and lived in, together with its garden. Urbano approaches the house as a mute witness that has absorbed successive layers of time, both in its built fabric and in the vegetation that grew around it. Rather than offering a historical reconstruction, the exhibition lets several narrative threads overlap, so that what visitors encounter is closer to the house’s whispered stories than to a documentary account.
One of those threads is Helen O’Gorman’s 1963 Spanish-language book ‘Plantas y flores de México’, a visual record of the botanical variety of central Mexico that also includes anthropological remarks on how people live with plants. The exhibition further alludes to Juan O’Gorman’s petro-murales, which draw on the world of stone, and hints at later alterations to the site made by the artist Helen Escobedo.
According to the museum, ‘Helen’ is the newest chapter in a body of work that Urbano treats as an archaeology of earlier desires and intentions. He rebuilds particular architectural spaces and gestures, drawing on techniques from theatre and cinema to stage immersive, dreamlike settings that sit between states, and turns the gallery into a place inhabited by ghosts and apparitions. Recreating a building, in this view, becomes a personal way of approaching another artist’s inner life, and of showing how a space can be seen as useful, inventive or neglected.
The exhibition is curated by Rosela del Bosque, associate curator, with curatorial assistant Carolina Estrada García. A public programme accompanies it, including the family sessions ‘Lo que crece entre las vías, vestigios de un jardín’ on 18 October, ‘Guardar un jardín’ on 25 October and ‘Soñé con una flor del tamaño de mi casa’ on 29 November, as well as an evening event, Noches en el Museo Jumex, on 28 October.
