Navot Miller: Sweet Liberty: Press Release and Images

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to present Sweet Liberty, Navot Miller’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, opening Thursday, June 25, 2026, with an artist reception from 6 –8:30 PM.

For the past several years, Navot Miller (b. 1991; Shadmot Mehola, Israel) has been building a life in America while reflecting on what it means to be free. Not as an abstract ideal, but as a lived condition: the ability to move through the world independently, to belong, to feel safe, and to shape a life on one's own terms. In this body of work, Miller reflects on these questions through paintings drawn from daily life, friendships, travels, fleeting encounters, grief and moments of intimacy witnessed and experienced over time.

Rather than presenting liberty as a certainty, the exhibition approaches it as something fragile, deeply personal, and inseparable from responsibility, contradiction, and struggle. The paintings simultaneously hold admiration and doubt, asking not only what freedom means, but how sweet it really is.

Working from photographs gathered over time, Miller paints friends, strangers, lovers, interiors, city streets, and landscapes charged with emotional resonance. A glowing taco truck on a snowy New York night becomes a small monument of warmth and solitude within the city. Elsewhere, portraits are rendered with tenderness and immediacy, allowing private moments to carry a shared emotional weight.

Throughout the exhibition, Miller moves between different environments and ways of living. Urban nightlife and intimate domestic scenes are contrasted with rural landscapes inspired by time spent with an Amish family in Pennsylvania, as well as observations of Orthodox Jewish life in Brooklyn. Having grown up in a rural Israel, Miller recognizes unexpected parallels between these communities — in their visual worlds, distinct languages, and the ways they have preserved strong social structures within contemporary American life.

For Miller, these groups embody a particular kind of prosperity and continuity shaped through separation, discipline, tradition, and tightly knit social bonds. Their presence within the exhibition complicates common notions of freedom, suggesting that liberty can sometimes emerge through chosen boundaries and alternative ways of living rather than limitless openness.

Across many paintings, figures are seen from behind, turned away from the viewer and oriented toward something beyond the frame — a horizon, a distance, or an unseen point of attention. These gestures resist closure and certainty. What lies beyond the frame remains unseen, yet looking carries emotional and symbolic weight — suggesting longing, curiosity, or orientation within one’s world. Across this body of work, Miller returns to this tension between presence and distance, allowing images to remain open-ended while quietly pointing toward admiration.

Borrowing its title from a bar Miller once visited in Miami, Sweet Liberty unfolds against the backdrop of America’s 250th anniversary. Rather than defining freedom in political or absolute terms, Miller approaches it as something lived and deeply human: imperfect, emotional, hard-earned, and never guaranteed.

Rather than searching for conclusions, Miller paints from a place of observation, gratitude, desire, and uncertainty — inviting viewers to recognize fragments of their own lives within the work.

Navot Miller has exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions across Berlin, London, and New York City, among others. His work has also been shown in group exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Jewish Museum of Australia. In 2025, two of Miller’s works were acquired by the Jewish Museum Berlin. He has participated in various residencies, including Fountainhead in Miami, ISCP in Brooklyn, and Tracey Emin’s residency program in Margate. Miller received his MFA from Weissensee Academy of Art Berlin and lives and works in New York.