“Amalfi Coast”, 2022, Oil on Canvas

“Terraza”, 2022, Oil on canvas

Above are two of the colorful paintings from Navot Miller’s exhibition, Eurovision, at Yossi Milo, in February of 2023.

From the press release-

With his distinctively vibrant palette, Navot Miller (b. 1991; Israel) draws from the flow of moments and memories in his own life, presenting the landscapes, architecture, and people he sees with fresh, inquisitive eyes. Growing up in a rural Israeli village, Miller found it difficult to express himself and his identity as a young gay person. Upon relocating to Berlin as an adult, he found a community of creatives who opened up new possibilities for self-expression. Among them were curator Joel Mu, who introduced Miller to Berlin’s alternative art scene, and instructors Michael von Erlenbach and Kathrin Ruhlig, who became his most significant mentors. Today, Miller’s bold, colorful palette has become a means of expressing the parts of himself that remained hidden during his childhood. The new body of work in Eurovision presents the artist’s past year living in Berlin and traveling through Europe. Nodding to the hit international singing competition of the same name, Eurovision encapsulates Miller’s experiences while journeying across a continent, collecting memories and forging relationships along the way.

The series of paintings presented in Eurovision focuses on those precious memories gathered during travel and the quiet yet meaningful moments of the everyday, offering colorful, candid snapshots from the artist’s life as he sees it. To capture these moments, Miller takes hundreds of photos as they pass, revisiting them later as the source material for his paintings. Amalfi Coast (2022) is painted from one such snapshot, depicting a group of vacationers as they lounge on a cliff by the Mediterranean Sea. Beyond the water’s edge, the complex topography of the rocky shore is simplified into flat planes of color. At the scene’s foreground, a man peers over the cliff’s edge, ensuring the waters below are safe for diving. Miller identifies the man as a father who, out of concern for his son out of view, scans the scene for any potential danger. Foregoing the climactic moment of the dive itself, Miller zooms in on this moment of preparation, quietly celebrating the familial love and the protective care between father and son.

A similar glimpse into the subtleties of intimacy is granted in Terraza (2022), which depicts a gathering of six men lounging on a Berlin terrace. Totally at ease, the men converse, cuddle, and convene in this scene of uninhibited repose. The commanding colors of Miller’s vibrant palette amplify what seems to be a hot summer day, as evidenced by the semi-nude men gathered outdoors. In terms of the painting’s composition, their bodies are the only portions of the work that the artist has blended. They consequently take on a depth and dimensionality that is absent from the rest of the rendering, bringing them into sharp relief against the flattened forms of their background. In this painting, Miller brings focus to the men who gather on this sunny terrace as a celebration of the simple pleasure of gathering on a summer’s day, and the joy of letting an evening’s events unfold as they may.