Upstairs Gallery: Nasir Young

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Nasir Young
Nowhere/Everywhere

May 15 – July 2, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, May 15, 6–8pm

Uffner & Liu is pleased to present Nowhere/Everywhere, Nasir Young’s first exhibition at the gallery. Young's investigation of the built urban environment – its gas stations, storefronts, corner stores, and parking lots – is a visual language that is at once hyperlocal to his upbringing in Philadelphia and universally legible across American suburbia.

Young's paintings unfold through observation. A lifelong skateboarder, he experiences the city through shifting speeds and from unexpected angles – the kind of looking that reveals what may be missed while walking or driving. His sketchbook, almost always on his person, functions as both field journal and archive, accumulating images that may sit for months or years before becoming paintings. The works in Nowhere/Everywhere are primarily drawn from Philadelphia, with other cities woven through. Since receiving a 2024 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, Young has traveled extensively – Concord, Nashville, Los Angeles, Fredrick – testing a central conviction: that the visual vocabulary of a corner store or a gas station translates across geography. A Philly rowhouse and a Kansas City laundromat speak the same structural language, even as they exist far apart from one another. The show takes its title from this very tension – the sense of familiarity that emerges from the foreign, and the strangeness that can surface in the deeply known.

Several works are anchored in specific observations that carry quiet humor and social weight. Who Needs Street Parking renders a car parked on the sidewalk in North Philadelphia – a small act of spatial rebellion in a city where it can often get very competitive to find parking. Sidewalk Sale, the largest work in the exhibition, stretches across two joined panels to depict a defunct gas station forecourt with an unsettling horizontal emptiness. A single sedan parked at its center oozes the ominous stillness of something waiting. Home Team plays with reflection and threshold, a storefront under construction covered in sheets that mirror the street outside, collapsing inside and outside into a single illusionary image.

Eastcoast Gas is one of the rare nocturnal scenes in the show, and perhaps the most atmospheric. The intimate 5x7-inch panel plunges the familiar gas station canopy into darkness, the red signage glowing against a near-black sky. To Young, the gas station is one of the few urban spaces that demands participation regardless of who you are – a site of pure, shared dependency that cuts across neighborhood and class. The painting distills that universality into something almost elegiac.

At the center of New Frontier For The Glory Days is a portrait of one of Young's friends, mid-ride on a small dirt bike. Behind him, an interposed Marlboro advertisement drops into the scene like an overlaid image-cum-cinematic backdrop: wheat fields, open sky, the Marlboro cowboy. Young grew up on westerns, and sees Marlboro's branding as among the most potent in American commercial history – the cowboy image functioning as its own kind of mythology. The painting holds these two figures, his friend and the cowboy, in an easy, unforced juxtaposition – two versions of frontier.

Taken together, the works in Nowhere/Everywhere make the case that the mundane is never merely background. Young treats the built world – its signage, its parking disputes, its all-night gas stations – as a portrait of collective life, one that rewards exactly the kind of sustained, unhurried attention he brings to it. The result is a body of work that feels as specific to Philadelphia as it is open to everywhere at once.

Nasir Young (b. 1995, Philadelphia, PA) received his BFA from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2021) and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Delaware, Newark, DE (2026). He has had recent solo exhibitions at Gross McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2025, 2024). Young’s work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Uffner & Liu, New York, NY (2025); Automat, Philadelphia, PA (2025); Fleisher Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2025); Scroll, New York, NY (2025); and Gross McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2023). He is the recipient of several awards including The Louis & Estelle Pearson Memorial Prize for Landscape with Figures, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Catherine Grant Memorial Prize, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His work is included in the permanent collection, The Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. Young currently lives and works in Newark, DE.

For all press inquiries, please contact Alejandro Jassan, ale@alejassan.com