Connecticut’s Florence Griswold Museum is celebrating the artistic legacy of Anna Held Audette (1938–2013) in a new exhibition opening Sept. 30 and running through Jan. 28, 2024.
“Abandon in Place: The Worlds of Anna Audette” celebrates the artist’s ability to find unlikely beauty and visual challenge within mankind-fueled deterioration that offered a jolting wreckage as the post-script to a once-glorious halcyon era. The Connecticut-based artist once defined her work as being able to “comment on the melancholy beauty found in relics of our industrial past.”
As the museum’s website explained, she “discerned loveliness in decay, creating large oil paintings of the disused factories, machines, and scrapyards that are America’s ruins. Her works reference the arc of America’s ascendance and decline as a manufacturing titan, a process that transformed our environment through the extraction of resources and the deposit of waste. The often considerable scale of Audette’s works, and their depiction of rusting machines in the workshops or fields in which they were made and used, position her compositions somewhere between landscape, still life, and abstraction.”
More information on the exhibition is found on the website of the Florence Griswold Museum, which is located in Old Lyme.
Photo: Anna Held Audette’s “Scrap Metal V,” 1990. Oil on canvas, 70 ½ x 80 in.; courtesy of the Florence Griswold Museum.
