Carmelo Arden Quin
Retrospective 1938–2009

Carmelo Arden Quin
Retrospective 1938–2009

Durban Segnini Gallery

Carmelo Arden Quin, Diábolo Coplanal #1, a variable geometry, 1945. Oil on wood, 14.9 x 18.3 inches.
March 19, 2014

Carmelo Arden Quin
Retrospective 1938–2009

March 21–June 21, 2014

Opening: Friday, March 21, 7pm

Durban Segnini Gallery
3072 SW 38th Ave.
Miami, FL 33146

gallery [​at​] durbansegnini.com

www.durbansegnini.com

The Durban Segnini Gallery  is pleased to present 60 artworks by Master Carmelo Arden Quin, one of the founders of the Madí movement, in a retrospective exhibition that comprises the years 1938 to 2009. In this collection of works Arden Quin’s inventions  are clearly presented by periods. His widow Sofia Arden Quin will be in attendance. Catalogue essay written by Raul Santana.

“On September 27, 2010, in his Parisian home of Savigny-sur-Orge, at the age of 97 and fully lucid, Carmelo Arden Quin ended his splendidly dynamic journey surrounded by the love of his wife Sofía Kunst, of the Uruguayan artist Bolívar and of dozens of artists who had absorbed his legacy and who follow the Master’s aesthetic propositions throughout the most varied scenarios in the world. Arden Quin was born in Rivera (Uruguay) on March 16, 1913, coincidentally at a time when European avant-garde movements were already seeking to emancipate from the sacrosanct law of nature to develop their own rules and their own creative ethos, facilitating the gestation of geometric abstraction.

In 2007, in a conversation in Paris with Sofía, Carmelo Arden Quin, while referring to some basic characteristics of the Madí movement—of which he was one of the founders in Buenos Aires in 1945—said: ‘Supports before Madí, both with figurative and non-figurative art, is a surface with four right angles in the shape of a square or a rectangle; up to that time, painting was carried out on that support, even geometric painting. The dimensions (height-width) are conceived using this criterion. In search of new shapes of planes, Madí starts to work with other polygons that could be regular or irregular: triangles, rhombuses, pentagons, hexagons, individual or juxtaposed, of which circles are also a part. This is the synthesis of Madí works. Simple works, without metaphysical aspirations or of any other kind.’ At the age of 94—that’s how old he was when this conversation took place—the artist was as lucid as in his youth and adulthood, but wiser. Those clear-cut definitions are a great synthesizer and at the same time compel us to cut through the road travelled, at least to some extent, to arrive at the simplicity of which Arden Quin was referring.

…But I find it necessary to point out that, beyond movements or groups, there are only artists revolving around programs, artists whose works are not the equivalent but the sum total of individual characteristics. Such is the case with Arden Quin, a singular force who has produced for more than sixty years a profoundly original body of work, the fruit of his inevitable will to renew and of his back and forth between intuition and conceptualization, in an uninterrupted dialog with plane and geometric forms.

Regarding this subject, I will mention that once, on a call I made to him in Paris shortly before his death, he began to talk about the triangle and the new possibilities it posed for him, as if he had just discovered it.”
–Raul Santana

About Durban Segnini Gallery
For over forty years, the Durban Segnini Gallery has played an important role introducing artists who have worked with abstract expressionism, abstraction, constructivism, geometric and kinetic art, as well as promoting new artistic values and the historical vanguards that have influenced them. Cesar Segnini director and owner founded Durban Segnini Gallery in Venezuela in 1970. In 1992, he established his first exhibition space in Coral Gables, relocated later in its current venue at 3072 SW 38th Avenue, a much larger gallery on the border of both cities: Miami and Coral Gables. With the world’s leading art galleries Durban Segnini Gallery attends international art fairs in Latin America, Europe and the US. Their expertise includes the integration of artworks to architectural spaces and its customized consultant services to private collections.

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March 19, 2014

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