Arden Quin

mixed media /collage

Carmelo Arden Quin
Biography
Uruguayan, born 1913
Carmelo Arden Quin was born in Rivera, Uruguay. From 1919 to 1930 he was educated in Marist institutions in Brazil; while a student, he became interested in Marxism. In 1930 he traveled in Argentina and Brazil. While a law student, he began to study painting in 1932 with the Catalan artist Emilio Sans. He returned to Uruguay in 1935. A meeting with Joaquin Torres-Garcia in Montevideo the following year proved decisive to his artistic career. Moving to Buenos Aires in 1938, Arden Quin studied philosophy and literature and became active in that city's avant-garde. He contributed to the cultural review Sinesis and, in 1939, with the poet Edgar Bayley and others, he attempted to found a magazine, Arturo. At that time he became interested in "primitive" art and also developed aesthetic theories based on the concept of dialectical materialism. In 1941, while still a student, Arden Quin was a founder of the cultural and political review El Universitario, and he continued to be politically active, opposing Nazism. He traveled in 1941 to Paraguay, in 1942 to Brazil, where he met members of Rio de Janeiro's avantgarde, and in 1943 to Uruguay, where he again met with Torres-Garcia. Upon his return to Buenos Aires, Arden Quin revived the review Arturo with a new group of artists, publishing a single issue in 1944. He participated in the two Arte Concreto-Invencion exhibitions in 1945. A year later he helped found the Grupo Madí and was influential in developing its artistic philosophy. During this period Arden Quin created abstract wood wall reliefs featuring geometric forms and, in some instances, movable parts, recalling Torres-Garcia's wood toys, which he had seen in 1939. He also produced irregularly shaped geometric paintings with areas of flat color bounded by heavy black lines, by 1947 the compositions became more complex and mechanistic. Although he broke with the Grupo Madi that year, he continued to participate in their exhibitions and promote their theories. Living in Europe from 1948 to 1952, he met Michel Seuphor, Jean (Hans) Arp, Auguste Herbin, Francis Picabia, and Nicolas de Staël, and from 1948 to 1956 he exhibited at the Salons des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris. Arden Quin traveled to Brazil in 1953 and organized in Sáo Paulo a conference on the Madí movement. In Buenos Aires in 1954 he helped found the group Asociación Arte Nuevo. In the late 1950s and 1960s he continued to exhibit in Paris and contribute to periodicals such as Ailleurs, which he directed from 1962 to 1966. His one-person exhibitions include shows at the Galerie de la Salle, Saint-Paul de Vence, 1978, and the Espace Latino-Américain, Paris, 1983. His work has been included in Vanguardias de la década del 40, Museo de Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sívori, Buenos Aires, 1980, and Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980, Hayward Gallery, London, 1989. Arden Quin lives in Savigny-sur-Orge, near Paris.
Excerpted from Latin American Artists of The Twentieth Century, The Museum of Modern Art, 1993

Argentina: Arte Concreto-Invencion, 1945, Grupo Madi, 1946

The return of prominent Latin American artists from Europe, among them Torres-Garcia, one of the founding members of Cercle et Carre, served as an impetus for the Argentinians who like their counterparts in Europe were declaring their allegiance to abstract art, against the resurgence of figurative art as represented by Surrealism.
   Arte Concreto-Invencion founded in 1945, held its inaugural exhibition in 1946. The term "concrete" developed from the artist's desire to differentiate themselves from the associations they believed to be implicit in the term abstract, which they felt emphasized a manner of extracting and reinterpreting reality rather than achieving a new reality. Their aims were partially achieved through the exploration of the frame and its relationship to the composition, culminating in the invention of the first shaped and transformable paintings.
   MADI, founded in 1946, and composed of many of the same members from Arte Concreto-Invencion further expanded these ideas. As Dawn Ades has written in Art in Latin America the MADI "began to emphasize the movement and articulation of its constructions droppingthe term 'concrete' and explored numerous ways of undermining or subverting the conventional, static easel painting or sculpture... They shared a redical rejection of past art, the refusal of representation and the abandonment of the figure, the search for new forms and experiments with new materials the blurring of traditional distinctions between painting and sculpture... With complete freedom, the MADI artists used a broad spectrum of avant-garde European art-Dada, Russian Constructivismas a springboard for invention." These experiments led to many innovations including the creation of shaped pierced canvases and the first neon and kinetic sculptures.
   The MADI group exhibited at the Salon des Realites Nouvelles and both movements were included in other important exhibitions in Paris. The works in this show are being exhibited for the first time in the United States and include rare documents and publications from the period. A major exhibition of these two movements will be held at the Zurich Kunsthaus in the spring of 1991.
   This exhibition affords the viewer an opportunity to view a selection of works from two very distinctive and important movements in art whose ideas and inventions were to have an impact on the European and American Geometric abstract art of the sixties. With this exhibitions the gallery continues to explore the developments and influences of European abstraction both throughout and outside of Europe.

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