Carmelo Arden Quin

Carmelo Arden Quin (16 March 1913, Rivera, Uruguay – 27 September 2010, Savigny-sur-Orge, France) was a Uruguayan artist.

Before Arden moved to Buenos Aires during the early 1940s, he lived in Uruguay and Brazil. In 1946, he moved to Paris and returned to Argentina in 1955 for one year. In 1956, he moved indefinitely to Paris, where he died. He was a poet, political writer, painter, sculptor and co-founder of the international artistic movement "Madí".

Arden Quin's personal style is full of contrasting colors and geometric patterns. Some of the main characteristic concepts in Quin's work are the irregular shaped frames, his "formes galbées" these are an alternation of concave and convex forms mainly in wood work, plastique blanche which are highly polished enameled wood pieces, and the coplanals, those are a series of polygons forming a single piece thath in some cases include moveable elements and sometimes remains static.

His first painting, "Naturel Morte Cubiste" or "Cubist Still Life" was created in 1934. At the age of 21, he met his mentor, the Uruguayan sculptor Joaquín Torres García who was directlly influenced by Piet Mondrian and Michael Seufor.

In 1946, before moving to Paris, Quin in collaboration with other artist and friends Martín Blaszko, Rhod Rothfuss, and Gyula Kosice, launched the Madí movement. The movement's main characteristics are: irregular frames, movable and displacing architecture, pan interval music composition and invented poetic propositions.

Many artists have been members of this international artistic movement since the 1940s until today, including Rhod Rothfuss, Juan Bay, Esteban Eitler, Diyi Laañ, Valdo Wellington, Arden Quin, Rodolfo Uricchio, Gyula Kosice, Nelly Esquivel, J. P. Delmonte, Maria Bresler, Abraham Linenberg, Éva Bányász, Salvador Presta, Eduardo Sabelli, Nair Oliveira, Ana Maria Bay, Muñoz Cota, Jorge Rivera, Ricardo Humbert, Alberto Scopelliti, Lisl Steiner, Aldo Prior, Isa Muchnik, Ricardo Pereyra, Alberto Hidalgo, Grete Stern, Juan Carlos Paz, and Ramon Melgar. In 1993, Arden Quin was included in the MOMA exhibit of "Latin American Artists of the twentieth Century". Several of Arden's pieces can be found at the MADI Museum in Dallas, Texas.