Yvonne Audette, Vaucluse, Sydney

Yvonne Audette (b. 1930), painter, studied under John Passmore at the Julian Ashton School from 1948 to 1952. In 1955, she embarked on a decade of travel and study in the USA, London, France, Spain and Italy, during which she mingled freely with the cutting-edge abstractionists of the day. She returned to Sydney, but moved to Melbourne, where she still lives and works, in 1969. In 1999 the Queensland Art Gallery mounted a major show of her works from the 1950s and 1960s, and a successful commercial exhibition followed. Nonetheless, Audette remained inexplicably obscure until 2003, when a major book, Yvonne Audette Paintings and Drawings 1949–2003 appeared. Since then, she has been described as Australia’s greatest living abstract painter. The National Gallery of Victoria held a retrospective of paintings she made while living in Florence and Milan, Yvonne Audette: Different Directions 1954–1966 in 2007–2008.