{"id":945687,"date":"2026-10-29T23:00:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T23:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/945687\/"},"modified":"2026-10-29T23:00:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T23:00:14","slug":"alvaro-urbano-revisits-casa-cueva-at-museo-jumex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/945687\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00e1lvaro urbano revisits casa cueva at museo jumex"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00c1LVARO URBANO REVISITS CASA CUEVA AT MUSEO JUMEX<\/p>\n

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An architectural history can begin with the person tending the garden. In Helen, at Museo Jumex<\/a> in Mexico City, \u00c1lvaro Urbano approaches Casa Cueva through the botanical imagination<\/a> of Helen Fowler O\u2019Gorman, the artist who shared the house with her husband, artist and architect Juan O\u2019Gorman. Built in the mid-20th century in Pedregal de San \u00c1ngel, the home brought architecture into close contact with the surrounding terrain and vegetation. Urbano draws its histories into an installation where sculpted<\/a> plants, geological references, and architectural memories occupy the same uncertain present. Curated by Rosela del Bosque and Carolina Estrada Garc\u00eda, the exhibition<\/a> runs from October 16, 2026, to February 7, 2027, placing Helen\u2019s work and her relationship with Mexico\u2019s flora at the center of the story.<\/p>\n

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Urbano\u2019s introduction to Helen came through conversations with Mexican friends, whose stories about Casa Cueva prompted him to investigate her practice. \u2018In spaces built by their own inhabitants, architectural decisions are closely tied to a way of living,\u2019 he tells designboom in an exclusive interview. For the artist, the house was itself a sculpture, its relationship with the landscape inseparable from the routines of those who lived there. \u2018The house opened onto the landscape, or rather surrendered itself to it, incorporating the conditions of the terrain and the presence of plants.\u2019 The garden Helen planted and maintained belonged to that same conception of space. Following her through the house shifts attention toward the daily acts of observation, cultivation, and care that helped give the architecture its character.<\/p>\n

\"\u00e1lvaroinstallation view \u00c1lvaro Urbano: Helen. Museo Jumex, 2026 | all images by Ramiro Chaves<\/a><\/p>\n

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HELEN FOWLER O\u2019GORMAN\u2019S BOTANICAL WORLD TAKES SHAPE<\/p>\n

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Inside her studio at Casa Cueva, Helen spent fifteen years working on the book published in 1961 as Mexican Flowering Trees and Plants. Its scope extended beyond her garden into the wider Mexican landscape, which she explored alongside Juan. While he searched for differently colored minerals for his petro-murals, she collected flowers and plants. \u2018There is something beautiful about that shared search for color: he found it in minerals; she found it in flowers and plants,\u2019 Urbano reflects. The parallel gives the exhibition<\/a> an intimate point of departure: two practices looking at the same terrain, gathering different elements, and bringing them back into a shared domestic world.<\/p>\n

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With Helen\u2019s original watercolors lost, Urbano<\/a> turned to the book\u2019s printed reproductions, translating their botanical imagery into three-dimensional forms through metal and paint. \u2018I conceived these sculptures as small monuments to her way of observing Mexico\u2019s flora, to her affections and the attention she devoted to it,\u2019 he explains. That passage from watercolor to printed page to sculpture makes the distance from the originals part of the work. Helen\u2019s plants enter another material life, carrying traces of her looking alongside the decisions of the artist interpreting them. Within the installation, they coexist with references to the Pedregal\u2019s geological landscape, Juan\u2019s petro-murals, and the later alterations made by Mexican artist Helen Escobedo, who subsequently occupied Casa Cueva.<\/p>\n

\"\u00e1lvaroinstallation view \u00c1lvaro Urbano: Helen. Museo Jumex, 2026<\/p>\n

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ARCHITECTURAL FICTION ALLOWS DIFFERENT TIMES TO COEXIST<\/p>\n

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Those successive lives remain deliberately unresolved. \u2018We do not know whether the petro-murals are being covered or uncovered,\u2019 Urbano says of the installation. \u2018Rather than fixing an original state of the house, I wanted its different times to coexist.\u2019 Testimonies, photographs, and material remnants offer access to Casa Cueva while leaving gaps and occasionally contradicting one another. Urbano gives those inconsistencies room within the exhibition, allowing the house to emerge through the experiences of its inhabitants. A visitor encounters a place whose transformations resist a single definitive account, with Helen\u2019s botanical work providing a way into memories that architectural histories can leave at the margins.<\/p>\n

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This interest in unfinished stories extends across Urbano\u2019s practice, which frequently returns to interrupted projects and places where something remains pending. Fiction lets him change the coordinates: continue an abandoned possibility or bring together moments that never coincided. \u2018Architecture thus becomes a character with its own voice, capable of recounting its changes, triumphs, and failures,\u2019 he explains. The question \u2018what if?\u2019 opens a building to possibilities beyond its documented past. It also prompts a closer look at the construction of that record: whose version survives, which experiences disappear, and what might still be told through the gaps. In Helen, that freedom allows the house\u2019s botanical, geological, and domestic histories to share a stage.<\/p>\n

\"\u00e1lvaroinstallation view \u00c1lvaro Urbano: Helen. Museo Jumex, 2026<\/p>\n

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SCULPTED PLANTS AND THE ART OF BELIEVABLE ILLUSION<\/p>\n

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Theater and cinema inform how Urbano builds these encounters, giving apparently ordinary objects the ability to suggest events beyond the visitor\u2019s view. Describing his installations, he points to cigarette butts that imply someone has just been there, or dry leaves that suggest a gust of wind has crossed a room. \u2018Illusion allows me to show the life of an object,\u2019 he says. \u2018More than replicating its appearance, I seek to imitate its life and transport it into a setting where it can tell a story.\u2019 Such details invite viewers to assemble their own account of what happened. Urbano connects this process to memory itself: fragmentary, blurred, and liable to absorb things that never occurred.<\/p>\n

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The illusion also rewards close inspection. Urbano sculpts the works in his Berlin studio without taking molds from the original objects, making each bend and inclination a deliberate gesture. \u2018The tilt of a leaf or the orientation of a flower gives them an attitude,\u2019 he explains. \u2018I am interested in how the object looks at you, what relationship it establishes with you.\u2019 Approaching the sculptures reveals their materials and the traces of their making, adding another encounter to the one suggested from a distance. For Urbano, discovering how the scene has been constructed leaves its emotional possibilities intact: \u2018As in theater, recognizing the artifice does not prevent us from entering the fiction or establishing an emotional connection with what happens.\u2019<\/p>\n

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