Museum of Geometric and MADI Art

About Museum of Geometric and MADI Art

The MADI Museum is the first museum dedicated to MADI, an obscure contemporary style that emphasizes innovative designs containing an array of geometric forms. The Museum seeks to show how the concept behind MADI is more than just an assembly of colored shapes, that the art is universally accessible and appealing.

The MADI (mah-DEE) art movement, launched by Arden Quin in Buenos Aires in 1946, was one of several modernist successful attempts to climb out of the turmoil of post World War II Europe and the Americas.  The works are considered by both artists and collectors to be playful, whimsical, colorful and breaching the square and rectangular boundaries which had restrained traditional art.  Often they are, or seem to be, more sculptural using materials and negative space to make their statements.  These abstract works are not representative or symbolic but focus on the geometric object itself, the shapes, texture, dimension and usually, vivid colors.  MADI works relate to other artists including Alexander Calder and Naum Gabo in their color, mobility, dimension and playfulness; they relate to Mondrian and Malevich as they are unbounded and geometric.

Carmelo Arden Quin took the MADI movement to Paris in the late 1940’s permanently rooting MADI in Europe.  Growing into other disciplines, MADI today includes over 75 sculptors, painters, architects, musicians and poets.

MADI’s history in Dallas goes back 10 years when Dallas collectors Bill and Dorothy Masterson purchased works from Volf Roitman, after which they began to collect MADI passionately.  When Bill’s law firm purchased an Uptown office building in 2002, they commissioned Roitman to design the façade; a colorful and varied landscape plan closely followed.  Today the exterior of the building is a geometric joy suggesting the contents of the inside – the museum where much of the Mastersons’s collection is on exhibit and a gallery where MADI artists are represented.