Álvaro Urbano’s exhibition Helen creates an immersive space where different temporalities, worlds, and memories converge around the Casa Cueva (Cave House), one of Juan O’Gorman’s most iconic works and a landmark of modern Mexican architecture. This site brings together the stories of the botanical illustrator Helen Fowler O’Gorman, his husband Juan Juan O’Gorman and, years later, the artist Helen Escobedo.

Urbano conceives this architecture as an almost oniric space where the landscape and the house merge into a single entity. In this project, Casa Cueva becomes a silent witness to the multiple layers of time and the material transformations that have shaped it.

The exhibition evokes a material atmosphere that recalls both the archaeological ruin and the oneiric quality that shrouds the house’s history in mystery. This is manifested in Helen Fowler’s O’Gorman illustrations for Plants and Flowers of Mexico, references to Juan O’Gorman’s petromurales, and Helen Escobedo’s figure. Rather than proposing a historiographical reading, these presences function as narrative threads that overlap and converse with one another, as though they were the different strata and murmurs of the stories that make up the Casa Cueva.