Yael Dresdner is a painter and mixed media artist whose work explores memory, landscape, transformation, and the emotional tensions embedded within the natural world. Originally from Haifa, Israel, she has lived in the United States for more than four decades and is now based in New York City. Alongside her artistic practice, Dresdner is also a designer and breath body mind teacher, bringing a meditative and deeply sensory awareness to her creative process.
Working across oil painting, watercolor, pastel, and mixed media, Dresdner creates compositions that move between abstraction and place based imagery. Her paintings often emerge from photographs and memory, transforming observed landscapes into emotionally charged environments where perspective, scale, and spatial certainty become intentionally unstable. Through layered surfaces, luminous color, and unconventional viewpoints, she invites viewers into spaces that feel immersive, fragmented, and quietly transcendent.
Dresdner’s work frequently explores dualities found both in nature and human experience: structure and fluidity, creation and destruction, darkness and illumination. Influenced by artists such as Monet, Rembrandt, Willem de Kooning, Tracy Emin, and Anselm Kiefer, her practice balances sensual materiality with emotional reflection. Across decades of exhibitions throughout New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and beyond, her work has continued to investigate the ways landscape can become a site for memory, meditation, and psychological resonance.
Currently Exhibiting in: New York, NY
Instagram: @yaeldresdner
Featured Artwork at Bushwick Gallery
Title: Float #9
Year of Creation: 2023
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 30 × 40 × 0.75 in
Edition Type: Unique, 1 of 1
Location: New York, NY
Price: $4,800
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Description
Float #9 is part of Yael Dresdner’s ongoing Float series, inspired by photographs taken at Sebago Lake in New York. The work emerged from a small enclosed area where water lilies, dead branches, reflections, and shifting light converged into a landscape filled with contradiction and quiet beauty. Dark water reflects towering trees while patches of illuminated sky seem to glow from beneath the surface, creating a visual tension between shadow and radiance, stillness and movement, decay and renewal.
Rejecting traditional landscape conventions, Dresdner removes the horizon line and flattens perspective, replacing expansive scenic views with concentrated fragments of environment. Through layered oil paint applied wet into wet, the composition becomes immersive and atmospheric rather than descriptive. Light appears to emerge from within the painting itself, dissolving distinctions between surface and depth.
Created during and after the emotional weight of the pandemic, Float #9 reflects a longing for calm, restoration, and reconnection with nature. The work becomes both meditation and refuge, capturing the sublime tension between fragility and resilience that exists within both the natural world and human experience.
Exhibition Information
Exhibition Title: Botanic Bodies
Theme: Organic elegance, natural forms, and expansive growth
Exhibition Dates: May 14 – May 21, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 14 / 6 PM – 8 PM
Private Showings and Events: Invite only throughout the week