For Alec Egan, 2025 was set to be a crowning year. The Los Angeles-based painter had spent the better part of two years preparing for three exhibitions: one at Anat Ebgi gallery in Los Angeles, a solo booth at FOG Design + Art Fair presented by Charles Moffett gallery, and a solo show at the Maki Collection in Tokyo, which would be Egan’s first major museum exhibition in Asia. By January, all of the works set to go on view—more than 20 paintings—were finally done. They were stored in his studio, behind his Pacific Palisades house.
For the past decade, Egan, 40, has painted a fictitious house, dedicating each new exhibition to a new room in it. “I’m a writer, and I have to narrate with painting,” says Egan. “Hopefully, [the viewer] will develop an idea about who lives in this house and let the story begin.” The project has resulted in beautiful, often large-scale works done with thickly impastoed paint. These works have a lifelike quality—one can tell the ottoman is velvet, that the bathroom tile is slippery—that contrasts with dreamlike details. With each show, the house becomes more familiar to his audience, as they gradually uncover the mystery of who inhabits it. For the paintings in this year’s exhibitions, Egan revealed the house’s final room: the kitchen.
Inside Alec Egan’s studio, the night before it burned down.
Courtesy of the artist.
Early on January 7, Egan was at home talking with his wife when he noticed a small, eerie plume of smoke from his bedroom window. “Six minutes later, that plume of smoke had grown to the size of 30 football fields,” says Egan. The sky quickly turned black. Egan evacuated his wife and their two young children, then called a friend with a truck to help him move his paintings. When Egan saw families running to their cars and traffic completely gridlocked, he called his friend back to say saving the paintings would be impossible, and Egan left without his art. It took five hours to drive two miles out of the Pacific Palisades. Over the next several days, multiple wildfires burned roughly 40,000 acres around Los Angeles.
The morning after evacuating, with no way of knowing whether his house and studio had survived, Egan borrowed a friend’s motorbike, put on a ski mask and goggles, and rode through the police barricades only to discover that the fire had destroyed both his family’s home and his studio. In addition to the three shows worth of work in his studio, the house had a handful of his favorite pieces.
Egan’s studio after fires ravaged the Pacific Palisades.
Courtesy of the artist.
After bouncing between hotels, Egan and his family have landed at a rental house in East Los Angeles. Although he’s devastated—every night he falls asleep thinking of his children’s rooms burning—he’s not paralyzed. Egan has already begun painting again. Using his gallery’s old office space as a makeshift studio and purchasing supplies as he goes—he lost all of those, too—he recognizes an undeniable new energy in his work. “The loss of the work does not disturb me,” says Egan. “Work is ephemeral. It lives within us. When you see fire reclaim something in front of your eyes, there’s a huge perspective shift— specifically, how insignificant and trivial the meaning you put on things is. It’s very relieving in that sense.”
“Guard Rail,” Egan’s first completed work since losing his home and studio.
Courtesy of Alec Egan
“Guard Rail,” Egan’s first completed work since the fire, is a 6-by-5-foot painting of a car on fire, set against a dark sky. Egan’s signature impasto brings the fire alive. While some of his larger scale works can take months to finish, the new piece took just 72 hours to complete. “When there’s this intensity of emotion and direct relationship, I am able to work in one place for long periods of time without moving,” says Egan. “The piece is coming out of me at once. I’ll never see a fire like that. I have to paint it. I did a very strange, intimate, fucked up dance with [it].” The painting will go on view at Frieze Los Angeles this coming weekend, in Anat Ebgi’s booth.
As for the three solo exhibitions, all is not lost. For FOG Design + Art Fair, Egan showed works on reserve as well as a few never-before-seen pieces. The exhibition sold out. His solo shows at Anat Egbi and Maki Collection have been postponed, but are set for September and next spring, respectively.
While Egan plans on doing several more fire paintings, he will also return to interiors. But the focus might not be that same psychedelic house with mismatched floral wallpaper, dripping candlesticks, and a stone-faced pet beagle that he’s worked on for a decade. “I have no interest in repainting the work that was lost,” says Egan. “This will push me into a more personal place with my work. I want to repaint each of my children’s rooms, in my own way— to rebuild what we had.” This time, there’s no mystery about who lives in the home.
