Yael Dresdner
About the Artist
Yael Dresdner is a painter and mixed media artist whose work explores memory, transformation, emotional tension, and the dualities found in both nature and human experience.
Originally from Haifa, Israel, Dresdner has lived in the United States for more than four decades and is now based in New York City. In addition to her artistic practice, she is also a designer and breath body mind teacher, bringing a strong awareness of the body, movement, and inner experience into her work.
Working across oil painting, pastel, fiber, and mixed media, Dresdner often begins with photographs and memory, then transforms them through color, texture, scale, and altered perspective. Her practice moves between landscape and the human form, while continually returning to themes of vulnerability, change, fragmentation, and connection.
Her work has been exhibited at venues including Bushwick Gallery, Art Lives Here, LIC Arts/Factory Gallery, 440 Gallery, La Bodega Gallery, and Heller Museum in New York City; Lyman Allyn Art Museum, Cummings Art Gallery, and Yale Divinity School in Connecticut; Drawing Rooms in Jersey City; and Sitka Gallery in Newport, Rhode Island.
Dresdner’s work can also be found in both private and public collections, including Thomson Financial, Robert Jackson, New York State Senator, The Chesapeake Group, Columbia Hospital for Women, and Charlie McBride & Associates.
Artist Statement
Painter & Mixed Media Artist
The human body is at the center of my figurative work, not simply as a physical form, but as a place where memory, emotion, vulnerability and identity reside.
Across my torso paintings, I return again and again to the female form, exploring how the body can hold many different states at once. Some works are intimate and small, while others expand the figure onto a much larger scale. Regardless of size, each torso develops its own personality, energy and emotional presence.
Working primarily with palette knives and oil paint, I build my figures through expressive, layered surfaces. Bodies emerge, separate and come together again through fragmented strokes, often set against smooth fields of luminous color. This contrast creates a tension between flesh and spirit, solidity and movement, vulnerability and strength.
Fragmentation is central to this body of work. I am interested in the spaces within and between the body and in the question of what makes us whole. Is the body simply a vessel that contains us, or do these spaces allow something less tangible to move through us and connect us to one another?
Many of my figures are shown from behind, drawing from the belief in yoga philosophy that the back of the body is where the subconscious is expressed and resides. The women are exposed, yet deeply inward. There is vulnerability in that exposure, but there is also power.
My ongoing Events in the Body: Mini Torsos series began almost by accident, when I used oil paint left over from a larger canvas to create a single small torso. That spontaneous beginning grew into an extensive series built from the same small group of source photographs. Despite their shared origins, no two torsos are alike. Each carries a different attitude, physicality and inner presence, reflecting the many states a woman can move through in the seconds, moments, hours and days of her life.
Together, my larger and smaller torso works explore womanhood and the continual process of becoming, changing, coming apart and finding form again.
