Navot Miller: Sweet Liberty

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to present Sweet Liberty, Navot Miller’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, which opens with an artist’s reception on Thursday, June 25, from 6–8 PM, and is on view through Friday, August 21, 2026.

In cityscapes, interiors, and portraits, Navot Miller (b. 1991; Shadmot Mehola, Israel) looks to the people around him, rendering casual snapshots onto canvas to share his life and travels in America, Germany, and beyond. In Sweet Liberty, the artist reflects on more than three years of living in New York. If the move to America initially held the promise of clarity, Miller has instead found it to generate more questions than answers. This sense of searching informs the exhibition, where freedom is inseparable from uncertainty and a sustained struggle to locate meaning and direction.

The paintings in Sweet Liberty reflect Miller’s ongoing state of negotiation—with his values, his desires, and the life he is building. This tension is expressed through a series of dualities: city and country, public and private, familiar and foreign, brightness and darkness. Throughout, Miller finds connection in many forms—in chosen family, in fleeting encounters between strangers, and in moments of intimacy that are at once tender and fragile. Miller’s jubilant style abounds in Sweet Liberty, flickering through bright and deep registers in tune with emotional tenor. In turns, the paintings shout with pinks, blues, and greens, and at other points they settle into lower, muted tones—playing what Miller calls “color games.”

Working from his personal archive of images, Miller selects moments charged with emotional resonance, often portraying people close to him caught in moments of quiet presence. Among his observational paintings are metropolitan nighttime scenes, such as a taco truck on a snowy night. Miller passed this spot daily on his studio commute, and it left an impression as a bright presence in the city’s wintry landscape. Compositions such as this draw on the influence of Edward Hopper in how they capture life on the outside through neon-lit shadows. Here, illumination suggests not only hope and joy, but also isolation and introspection within contemporary homosexual, immigrant, and Jewish life.

Outside the city, Miller’s urban scenes are contrasted with countryside vistas that recall time spent with the Amish in New Holland, Pennsylvania. The artist identifies a cultural affinity with this group, having grown up in a rural Ultra-Orthodox environment in Israel. The self-determination of both the Amish and Orthodox emerges through hard work and forms of restriction—limiting technology and external cultural influence—yet results in continuity and cohesion. In both cases, a sense of freedom is located not in boundlessness, but in the structure of tightly knit ways of living.

Miller goes as far afield as the mountains of Argentina, where he found great camaraderie among fellow travelers while backpacking. A panoramic diptych anchors Sweet Liberty, showing two companions on horses looking out at a field of sunflowers. The wonder captured in this image resonated with Miller in the studio, and the artist was moved to create what he refers to as a “love object,” crystallizing his feelings in paint. The work deals in reality through green leaves, dun ground, and brown horses, and yet abounds in emotion through orange skin, pink clothes, and a flash of aurora-like light in the sky.

Sweet Liberty borrows its name from a bar Miller visited in Miami, Florida; even in a brief encounter, the phrase left a lasting impression. Here, “liberty” is not treated as a given, but as a cherished condition that must be examined, tested, and at times, fought for. Miller’s reflections on his time in America unfold on the eve of the country’s 250th anniversary, prompting a reconsideration of liberty not as a stable promise, but a channeling of conflict, doubt, and persistence into an ongoing practice. Rather than offering conclusions, the works in this exhibition hold space for uncertainty—suggesting that freedom may lie not in arriving at answers, but in the willingness to remain with the questions.

Navot Miller has exhibited work widely in the United States and abroad, including solo exhibitions at DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, Berlin, Germany; Café C/O Berlin, Germany; 1969 Gallery, New York, NY; The Jewish Museum of Australia, St. Kilda, Australia; Grove Collective, London, UK; and Wannsee Contemporary, Berlin, Germany. He has presented work in group exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Werkstattgalerie, Berlin, Germany; BEERS, London, UK; Unit 1 Gallery, London, UK; and Art Zagreb, Croatia, among others. In 2025, two works by Miller were acquired by the Jewish Museum Berlin, Germany. Miller was awarded residencies at Fountainhead, Miami, FL, and the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, NY in 2025; and the Radical Residency at Unit 1 Gallery in London, UK in 2024. Murals by the artist have been displayed at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany; C/O Berlin, Germany; and Mekif Ort School Sajur, Israel. The artist received his Diploma from Weissensee Art School in Berlin, Germany. He currently works and lives in New York, NY.