Navot Miller
From Sep 16, 2023 until fall 2024, C/O Berlin presents the Artistic Intervention Lago di Homo by Israeli artist Navot Miller at the Café C/O Berlin × Barkin'Kitchen at Amerika Haus, Hardenbergstraße 22-24, 10623 Berlin.
Mountains, beaches, palm trees, the sea. A few figures chatting, relaxing, or gazing tranquilly into the horizon. Navot Miller’s (b. 1991) color palette makes this seemingly humdrum vacation scene extraordinary. Rich in contrasts, the sand glows like pink cotton candy and the sky is lemon yellow. The sea stretches out like a single block of deep blue.
Miller’s dreamlike visual world does not stop at realism. Its unhampered and figurative interpretation of reality plays with our expectations and senses. Miller takes inspiration from everyday life and intimate moments from his own experiences and travels, playfully capturing the landscapes, buildings, and individuals he encounters. The countless personal photographs and videos archived on his smartphone provide the starting point for his paintings. His new work, too, draws on vacation photos from Lake Como in northern Italy (2023). The piece shows moments of friendship, homoerotic tension, and the banality and lightness sparked by an endless summer.
Usually Miller transfers his photographs to canvas using oils, but for his large-scale mural for C/O Berlin, he chose a matte emulsion. Sometimes he thinks carefully about how to fill in the figures and forms he has sketched, and other times he works more intuitively, with his characteristic full-coverage color applications. In addition to the primary colors red, yellow, blue, and green—a group of colors often used for children’s toys, which Miller chooses deliberately and recontextualizes—he also mixes other shades to achieve harmonic nuances. Occasionally, divergent colors are seen in the skin, hair, textiles, and plants.
This artistic intervention is Miller’s first in Berlin, and his second extensive mural. Previously, he created a work for the exterior of a school in Sajur, Israel, in 2023.
As the Berlin winter approaches, the work feels like a promise of a vacation next summer.
Navot Miller (b. 1991) was born and raised in the Orthodox settlement of Shadmot Mehola in the West Bank. He studied architecture at UdK (Berlin University of the Arts) and received his degree in fine art from the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin in 2022. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at galleries such as the Yossi Milo Gallery, New York (2023); 1969 Gallery, New York (2022); Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv (2022); Grove Collective, London (2022); Wannsee Contemporary, Berlin (2022); and Elektrohalle Rhomberg, Salzburg (2021). In addition, his work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Werkstattgalerie, Berlin (2019); Art Zagreb, Croatia (2019); Vienna Contemporary Art Fair, Austria (2020); and Radical Residency V, Unit 1 Gallery, London (2020). He lives and works in Berlin.