CARMELO ARDEN QUIN was born on March 16, 1913 in Rivera (Uruguay). He approached the plastic arts through the Catalan writer Emilio Sans, a friend of his family. In 1935 he met Joaquín Torres García at a conference at the headquarters of the Theosophical Society. After his proposals in a cubist style, he was leaning towards his first non-orthogonal paintings, transgressing the traditional limits of the rectangle. He exhibited some of those works during a demonstration in support of the Spanish Republic.
From the end of 1937 he settled in Buenos Aires, frequented the avant-garde artists and studied philosophy and literature at the University. In this city he shared the workshop with the Chilean artist Miguel Martínez, who introduced him to Gyula Kosice. In 1941 he was co-founder of the bimonthly newspaper El Universitario, where he published his political and aesthetic ideas. He participated in the publishing group of Arturo. Revista de Artes Abstractas [Abstract Arts Magazine] together with Kosice, Rhod Rothfuss, Edgar Bayley, Tomás Maldonado and Lidy Prati. In 1944 they edited the only issue of that publication, in which Murillo Mendes, Vicente Huidobro and Torres García also collaborated.
In 1945 he participated in the Movimiento de Arte Concreto Invención (MACI) which presented his works at the private residences of Pichón Rivière and Grete Stern. In 1946 the group was divided, one part arose the Arte Concreto Invención Association and, on the other, the Madi Group. Within the latter, Arden Quin participated in the four exhibitions that were presented during the second half of that year at the Van Riel Gallery and at the “Altamira” Free School of Plastic Arts, held in Buenos Aires, as well as in the first Madista International exhibition, organized at the Ateneo de Montevideo. In this period he made polygonal frame works, mobile structures, coplanars, object paintings and concave works, which he called Formes Galbées. Around 1948 he moved to Paris, where he frequented Michel Seuphor, Marcelle Cahn, Auguste Herbin, Jean Arp, Georges Braque, and Francis Picabia, among other avant-garde artists. There, he held numerous exhibitions and participated in the Salon des Realités Nouvelles.
During this period, he introduced collage and decoupage in his work, a resource that he used until 1971. In Buenos Aires, he co-founded the Arte Nuevo group, made up of artists of different non-figurative tendencies, which held its first exhibition at the Van Riel Gallery (1954). In Paris he directed the magazine Ailleurs and, during the 1960s, he participated in the Poesía Concreta movement. After fifteen years, in 1971, he returned to painting. He continued to work at his home in Savigny sur-Orge until his death on September 27, 2010.