Arden Quin, Carmelo (1913–)

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Arden Quin, Carmelo (1913–)

Carmelo Arden Quin (b. 1913), Uruguayan abstract artist. Born in Rivera, Uruguay, Arden Quin was educated in Catholic schools in Brazil. He converted to Marxism in 1930 and began to study art in 1932. In 1935 he met the influential constructivist artist Joaquín Torres García in Montevideo. Moving to Buenos Aires three years later, Arden Quin studied philosophy and literature, and soon joined that city's artistic avant-garde, which included Edgar Bayley, Gyula Kosice, Tomás Maldonado, and Lidy Prati. By the early 1940s, Arden Quin's early cubist style had given way to a geometric abstraction that tentatively rejected the convention of a rectangular frame by employing irregular and cut-out supports for paintings and collages; he pursued this direction in his art throughout the remainder of the decade, as did others in his milieu. He also experimented with sculptures and paintings with movable components, such as his Coplanal (1945), a square relief with manipulable geometric figures at each corner.

Along with Kosice and Rhod Rothfuss, Arden Quin was one of the chief contributors to the single issue of the review Arturo, published in 1944, and with them he initiated the Grupo Madí in 1946. He and the sculptor Martín Blaszko left the group in 1948, and Arden Quin moved to Paris, where he began to associate with some of the leading figures of European abstract art, including Jean Arp, Auguste Herbin, Michel Seuphor, Constantin Brancusi, Serge Poliakoff, and Nicolas de Staël. One-man exhibitions of Arden Quin's art were held at the Galerie de la Salle, Saint-Paul de Vence, in 1978 and at the Espace Latino-Américain, Paris, in 1983.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mari Carmen Ramírez, "Re-Positioning the South: The Legacy of El Taller Torres-García in Contemporary Latin American Art," and Florencia Bazzano Nelson, "Carmelo Arden Quin," in Mari Carmen Ramírez, ed., El Taller Torres-García: The School of the South and Its Legacy (1992), pp. 260-261, 348-349.

Elizabeth Ferrer, "Carmelo Arden Quin," in Waldo Rasmussen et al., eds., Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century (1993), p. 372.