Alec Egan (b. 1984, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in his hometown, where the city’s cinematic atmosphere and luminous palette deeply inform his painting practice. Rooted in creative writing and storytelling, his works transform domestic interiors, landscapes, and still lifes into staged psychological spaces. Through thick impasto and densely patterned compositions, mundane objects become charged with memory, longing, and unease.

Egan’s paintings unfold like chapters in a visual novel, each canvas depicting a room in an imagined home. Recurring motifs such as boots, vases, and books create emotional continuity, inviting viewers to piece together a narrative around an absent inhabitant. Visually and conceptually maximalist, Egan’s patterned surfaces—recalling mid-century interiors, vintage wallpapers, and the ornamental traditions of William Morris—carry psychological and cultural weight. Nostalgia becomes both subject and strategy, transforming decoration into a metaphor for memory and desire.

Drawing from Los Angeles’s light, design vernacular, and cinematic sensibilities, his work bridges fiction and reality, beauty and disquiet. Though grounded in the material world, Egan’s work often tips into the surreal: waves flood carpeted rooms, palm trees pierce ceilings, and spatial logic dissolves into dream. These moments of rupture mirror the instability of memory, isolation, and domestic life—particularly against the backdrop of California and broader climate precarity. Themes of voyeurism and intimacy blur the line between observer and subject, casting the viewer as both witness and participant.

Recent solo exhibitions include Blue Setting (2023), The Study (2021), and Pets (2019) at Charles Moffett, New York; Drawing Room at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center (2023); Look Out at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2022); Miro’s Corner at MAKI Gallery, Tokyo (2021); and Welcome Home at the California Heritage Museum (2017). His work has been featured in group exhibitions at Almine Rech (Paris), MAKI Gallery (Tokyo), Dubuque Museum of Art (Iowa), and Torrance Art Museum (California). Egan’s paintings are held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.