Álvaro Urbano

Álvaro Urbano was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1983 and lives and works in Berlin. He studied Interior Architecture at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid and subsequently studied Fine Arts at the Institut für Raumexperimente at the Universität der Künste Berlin. His practice encompasses installation, sculpture, performance, and architectural interventions, often combining strategies drawn from theatre and filmmaking with an interest in architecture, design, and the histories embedded within built environments. Urbano’s installations often take the form of staged environments in which lighting, sound, architecture, and sculptural elements are brought together to create immersive situations. His work involves what he describes as an archaeology of desires and past intentions: by recreating specific spaces and architectural gestures, he explores the narratives and memories embedded in buildings and their surroundings. His projects are frequently structured as scenes or sequences, transforming exhibition spaces into environments that occupy a space between reality and fiction. Vegetal and animal forms play an important role in these constructed environments. Urbano often creates highly detailed simulations of organic elements that initially appear natural but reveal their artificial character upon closer observation. These elements function not simply as props but as active components within his fictional settings, interacting with the surrounding architecture and contributing to the narratives developed within the installation. Through this strategy, familiar spaces can acquire an oneiric and uncanny quality. Architecture and its histories provide a recurring point of departure for Urbano’s work. His projects have engaged with buildings, ruins, gardens, interiors, and modernist structures, often reconfiguring them through theatrical and speculative interventions. Rather than treating architecture as a fixed backdrop, he uses it as a material through which histories, desires, and alternative narratives can be brought into view. His installations consequently create situations in which the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, scenography, and performance become deliberately fluid. In 2024, Urbano presented *TABLEAU VIVANT* at SculptureCenter in New York. The project centred on *Atrium Furnishment*, a public artwork by American artist Scott Burton that had been installed in the lobby of the Equitable Center in New York in 1986 and dismantled in 2020. Urbano reorganised approximately half of Burton’s original elements throughout SculptureCenter’s ground floor, transforming them into a new sculptural landscape. Painted-metal botanical forms, architectural fragments, lighting, and other elements were incorporated into the installation, creating a speculative dialogue between Burton’s work, Central Park’s Ramble, and the histories associated with public and semi-public space. Other major projects include *La eterna adolescencia* at TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes in 2023, *The Great Rings of Saturn* at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York in 2021, and *Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas*, developed with Petrit Halilaj and presented at Ocean Space in Venice in 2023 and at MACBA in Barcelona in 2024. Urbano and Halilaj have maintained a long-standing artistic collaboration, presenting joint projects at institutions and exhibitions including the 24th Biennale of Sydney, MACBA, Ocean Space, and the Museo Reina Sofía’s Palacio de Cristal. Urbano’s work is held in public collections including the Bass Museum in Miami, Singapore Art Museum, the Hamburger Bahnhof Collection in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, TEA Tenerife, TBA21, Museo Jumex in Mexico City, and FRAC Bretagne. Through his combination of architecture, sculpture, scenography, and fiction, Urbano creates immersive environments in which existing spaces and histories are reconfigured into new situations, allowing architecture to become a site for memory, speculation, and imaginative transformation.