Highlights from the ANU Art Collection: Yvonne Audette

Yvonne Audette, The walls of Jericho 1959

Layer upon layer of marks — whitewashed or worn with time, magical ghostly marks remaining.
— Yvonne Audette

Painted in Milan in 1959, The walls of Jericho exemplifies Yvonne Audette’s enduring fascination with graffiti, inscription, and the expressive language of mark-making. In its interplay of flat planes, rhythmic lines, and symbolic gestures. The walls of Jericho reflects Audette’s interest in the surfaces of cities, particularly the ancient walls in the streets and catacombs of Florence, and the aged murals that transform inert walls into dynamic, living sites of memory.

The painting was acquired for the ANU Art Collection in 1975, following Audette’s return to Australia after two decades abroad. Her artistic trajectory began in New York in 1952, where she encountered the Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell, and absorbed the critical influence of Clement Greenberg. In Europe, she established studios in Florence and Milan, where a meeting with Cy Twombly in 1958 confirmed her own conviction in the expressive potential of the mark.

In The walls of Jericho, Audette’s palette knife scrapes through amber, blue, and grey tones, revealing the residue of earlier gestures beneath. Like a palimpsest of urban walls, its layered surfaces evoke the passing of time and the persistence of human expression.

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On show in ANU Art Collection: Conjunction, 24 October – 21 December 2025