Adam Dressner Paints Your Favorite New Yorkers in Full-Spectrum Color

If you’ve got a face, Adam Dressner wants to paint it.

Dressner, a former corporate lawyer, has made a name for himself as a self-taught painter known for wheeling his “art cart” of painting supplies to Washington Square or Central Park and making loose, expressive plein-air portraits of the eccentric New Yorkers he meets.

This past week, Dressner took his cart to 1969 Gallery in Tribeca, where he sat beneath a brown butcher paper sign reading “Fine Art Portraits” in Tom Sachs studio-style scribble, completing 18 paintings in the days leading up to “Hello Stranger 2,” his debut solo gallery exhibition, which opened Friday night.

Composed of more than a dozen large-scale oil paintings and a salon wall of 60 12 x 9-inch acrylic portraits, the exhibition is an evolution of “Hello Stranger,” a show he co-presented with jeweler Greg Yuna last September, in which Dressner live-painted subjects at Grand Central Terminal over the course of three days.

Some of the salon wall subjects are recognizable—the restaurateur Keith McNally, the infamous grifter Anna Delvey, the rapper Lil Yachty—while others come from Dressner’s milieu, like Rafael, a waiter in his neighborhood, or Mr. Love, a man in his 90s whom Dressner met in the park and has since befriended.

“This is artwork for everybody,” says Dressner. “Everybody’s got a face. When you look at the salon wall of 60 12-inch-by-9-inch boards, you can’t tell the difference between a literary giant like Joyce Carol Oates, or somebody who is an everyday person from the park.”

Many of the subjects attended Friday’s opening, including Oates, Delvey, the influencer Nicolas Heller (known as New York Nico), Leah McSweeney of The Real Housewives of New York, and art collector Carla Shen, along with many of the subjects of his large-scale portraits: the poet Matt Starr, Metro North employee Sunny Sueruro, and a man named Monty who is known for sunbathing in Washington Square Park. At one point, one of Dressner’s most-painted subjects, David Rosa, entered in a tuxedo, wheeling in a speaker blaring Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” and breaking out in a dance, a routine he reprised from the first “Hello Stranger” opening. Dressner, wearing the signature blue baseball cap he is never seen without, watched him, beaming. Other guests included the writer James Frey, actress Sophia Anne Caruso, and artists Jon Burgerman, Lizzy Lunday, and Kristian Kragelund.