His dealer, Anat Ebgi, is letting him use her gallery as a makeshift studio, after his home was destroyed in the Palisades blaze.

On January 7, Alec Egan (b. 1984) experienced an unthinkable tragedy when his home and studio burned to the ground in Los Angeles's Palisades Fire, the fire taking with it all the work for a planned solo show at his Los Angeles gallery, Anat Ebgi.

Two weeks later, Egan was back in the studio, painting what he saw during his harrowing escape from a neighborhood on fire, cars abandoned to the flames as their drivers fled on foot to the sea. Now, Ebgi is bringing a large new painting inspired by the devastating blaze to Frieze Los Angeles.

"The loss of the house and the studio was obviously devastating.

But it was more devastating as a family man," Egan, who has a four-year-old and a six-month-old, told me. "That's the place where I raised my children, that my wife calls her home and her office too, and that I grew up in. It was a lot of emotional loss. But the loss of my work was motivating."

"My response to this is to come back even better than I was before," he added. "That sounds cliché, but it's not even a conscious response. I'm pregnant with feeling to paint and with ideas to paint -- and I was that way before, too.... It's just really important for me to continue to create, and have something come out of this terrible situation."

For his dealer too, it seemed imperative to carry on.

"Of course, none of us thought of Frieze in those first few days," Ebgi told me. "There were weeks of shock and grief and the feeling of helplessness."

And when people did start thinking about Frieze, there was some sense that maybe it wasn't appropriate to focus on selling art right now. That maybe the hotel rooms were needed for displaced locals, rather than art fair visitors. But then Ebgi started to talk to local artists, who seemed to be reaching a different consensus.

"It felt like artists really needed to feel a coming together. They needed hope, something to look forward to," she said.

Ebgi was one of the loudest voices advocating for Frieze to return as scheduled. And she pivoted to organize a group show featuring 15 Los Angeles artists, with 10 percent of the gallery's proceeds going to the L.A. Arts Community Fire Relief Fund. (The dealer also mobilized to sell posters from Egan's 2022 exhibition for $100 each as a fundraiser for the artist; the full edition of 100 sold out to buyers in 44 states, Australia, Germany, Canada, and the U.K.)

The exhibition is titled "The Wave," after the lone painting that Egan had brought to to the gallery early for his now-cancelled solo show, "The Feast, the Sea, the Mother, the Sky, the Mark, the Mountains, and the Watcher," which had been slated to inaugurate the gallery's renovated space on January 25. ("The Wave" includes that work as well as one of Egan's new fire paintings.)

The day of the fire, an art handler was on his way to Egan's home to pick up the rest of the work -- because it was a local show, Egan had held on to the work longer than usual, taking his time to put the finishing touches on the 15 paintings.

Then, that morning, the artist looked out the window and saw the smoke.

Before there was even an evacuation order in place for the neighborhood, he was on the phone with the gallery.

"We were talking probably every 10 minutes. I was probably calling him, annoyingly, more than he wanted!" Ebgi told me. "It's funny, because on January 2, our registrar at the gallery texted me 'I feel like we should get Alec's work out of the studio.' When I look at that message from her, I'm like, 'She knew it.'"

But in the lull immediately following the holidays, no one was available. So the pickup was scheduled for Tuesday, once everyone was properly back from break. Even when it became clear that the art handler wasn't going to be able to make it to the house amid the chaos of the evacuation, the main concern was the potential for smoke damage.

"I thought, 'We'll get a conservator. We'll figure it out,'" Ebgi recalled. "There was no thought in my mind that the entire community, the entire neighborhood, the entire town was gonna burn down."

But that's exactly what happened, and Egan witnessed it -- both the rapidly encroaching flames and the frantic evacuation, and the still-smoldering remains the next morning, when he bypassed police barricades by motorbike to confirm for himself that his home was gone. (In addition to the work for the Ebgi exhibition, there were paintings for a planned booth at Fog Design and Art in San Francisco with New York's Charles Moffett -- which instead showed two small new fire paintings -- and for a show at Maki Gallery in Tokyo.)

It was an experience Egan immediately channeled into his art. With a rare break between exhibitions at the gallery's second location on Fountain Avenue, Ebgi quickly set up a makeshift studio for the artist on the building's mezzanine.

"It was weird because I had no paintbrushes.

I had nothing," Egan said. "The woman at Blick started crying because I told her my house burned down."

But back at the gallery, having Egan at work was an invigorating experience.

"I've actually found it a lot of fun," Ebgi said. "It's the way I envisioned having a gallery. An artist actually painting paintings. There's installers installing work downstairs.

There's so much activity happening, and it is actually really exciting."

The first two works Egan completed on site were a painting of a burning home and a painting of a car on fire. They represent a major departure from the colorful canvases of floral-heavy interior scenes for which Egan has become well known.

"If I were to go to Frieze with some big flower painting, it wouldn't be very authentic right now," Egan said. "It would be hiding from something."

His works, he explained, are always drawn from life and express a maximalist, slightly surreal vision of the world he lives in every day, and it wouldn't feel natural to paint something he hadn't personally witnessed.

"When you experience the power of a fire, and it takes a lot away from you, it's an emotionally charging event that deserves catharsis. But on the other hand, as a painter, you get to see the inside of something you would never see," Egan said. "I got to see a massive fire and have some sort of bizarre, dysfunctional reverence for it at the same time that it was claiming my community."

When I asked Ebgi what she thought of these fire works, Egan jokingly answered for her: "Genius."

For her part, Ebgi spoke of the "urgency" of the paintings. "They are really painful images," she said. "They are certainly shocking, but it felt natural that's what would come out of him after something like this happened. And even though it's so painful and destructive, there is beauty in it."

The painting of the burning car, which will be at Frieze, "is such a simple and powerful painting," the dealer added. "There's the car.

There's the railing of the [Pacific Coast Highway], and the palm tree -- just those three things, and of course, that incredible black-into-blue sky."

The work is priced at $50,000, though it remains to be seen if it will have the same market appeal as Egan's regular fare.

"I'm sure there are going to be some people who have an aversion, but more so, the whole city was touched by this thing," Egan said. "There is great coming together in unity, and I think people are looking for a vehicle to talk about this tragedy.

And that's what you hope artists do. I'm grateful I was able to crystallize this moment, because it happened to all of us."

"If an artist has the courage to paint something traumatic or something destructive that they have experienced, they hope that the viewer can extend the courage to at least experience it," he added. "Art should be an assault on our senses."

Ebgi is also seeing Egan's pre-fire work in a new light. "Alec plays a lot with a really powerful sunset motif. The gradation of the deep oranges into yellows or pinks -- these colors are also the colors of fire. So now, when I look back at the work that he's made in the past, I'm like, 'Is that a sunset or is that fire?' It's like it was always there."

And the artist is also revisiting, on a limited basis, the works lost in the blaze. The Ebgi exhibition was meant to be the culmination of a series Egan had been working on for a decade, in which he had been painting an imagined home, room by room, for each new gallery show. The paintings that burned depicted the kitchen, and featured a recurring, elaborate floral wallpaper motif.

Egan is preparing a capsule presentation of four new paintings for Art Basel Hong Kong in March that will pay homage to the pieces that burned.

"They preserve a little capsule of that imagery, because we decided it deserved to be honored. There needs to be one little remnant of it, so the world can at least see part of what I was doing," Egan said. "I spent years dealing with this pattern and this imagery."

He's still coming to terms with what it means to lose it all before getting to share it with the world: "In a way it's liberating, and in a way it's like coming to the end of your thesis and it all gets deleted off your computer!"

It's remarkable that Egan has had the mental fortitude to create new work in these trying circumstances, having lost all his belongings and, in his paintings, the source of his livelihood. The family is beginning the difficult recovery process while caring for a toddler and infant.

Though a friend in real estate was able to connect Egan to an affordable rental while they consider the long-term possibilities of rebuilding, it is on the East side in Melrose Hill, which means a two-hour commute to take his older daughter to school in Santa Monica.

But the house is near the gallery-turned-studio, and Egan remains almost singularly driven to paint -- partly because he has so many ideas he wants to put to canvas, and partly because he is committed to relying on his art to give him the means to bounce back from this loss.

"My mentality is to work my way out of this, and that's what I'm going to do," Egan said. "It's a lot to come back from. How I've been coping with it has been by working."

Frieze Los Angeles is on view at the Santa Monica Airport, Santa Monica, California, February 20-23, 2025.