Carmelo Arden Quin
Wednesday, 7 August 2013
From Top: Murcurial (1945), Coplanal (1945), Négal (1946), Composition (1945-6)
“Carmelo Arden Quin was born in 1913 in Rivera Uruguay, a town on the Brazilian border. He had an uncle who painted cubist paintings, and in 1934 in Rivera Arden Quin created his first surviving painting, “Naturel Morte Cubiste” or “Cubist Still Life.”
In Montevideo twenty-one year old Arden Quin met his mentor, the artist Joaquin Torres-Garcia, then in his sixties. Torres-Garcia had just returned from Europe where he had been influenced by Piet Mondrian and Michel Seufor: Torres-Garcia and Seufor formed the Cercle et Carre group, which included Mondrian and Vantongerloo and was dedicated to geometric and constructivist art. In Montevideo Arden Quin studied under Torres-Garcia and was influenced by his transformable and articulated sculpture pieces.
During the 1940’s Arden Quin joined intellectual writers and artists in Buenos Aires. In 1944, after working on it for several years, he brought out the literary and artistic journal Arturo, in which he applied dialectic materialism of art. He also contributed his prose proem Pegasus Eats Grass in Chaos, which refers (secretly due to censorship) to the horrors of World War II. In August of 1946 Arden Quin read to the public the MADI Manifesto, which he had written, and which launched the MADI movement.”
-Excerpt from the Museum of Geometric and MADI Art