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.
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.
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.
