Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce Groundskeeper, Alec Egan’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from April 4th through May 16th, 2026.
Egan’s most recent series stems from the psychological concept of the prodromal — a clinical term describing the onset of psychosis before it fully emerges. Through meticulous layers of clashing patterns, prints, and textures, Egan constructs images that blur the distinction between real and imagined, found and fabricated, giving form to a state of heightened perception teetering on the edge of collapse. The paintings are awash in tension and hypervigilance, a psychic atmosphere the artist channels into the iconic Los Angeles sunset, rendered in gradients of saturated pink, orange, and blue, as an allusion to the city’s seductive beauty, its embrace of spectacle and artifice, and its proximity to existential threat. As Egan’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since the 2025 Palisades fire, which claimed his home and studio, Groundskeeper locates that personal and collective loss within a broader inquiry into the fragility of the constructed self.
Each painting in the show reveals carefully cropped glimpses of an imagined home and the surreal landscape in which it is situated. Grand vistas reminiscent of the beaches and mountains surrounding Los Angeles are lit by spectacular skies that alternately impart a sense of gravitas and orchestrated sentimentality to the work. Still life arrangements of an idiosyncratic collection of objects, including a floral-patterned umbrella, a woven chicken-shaped basket, a lamp, a hammer, flowers, and a book titled “RUN” are depicted against elaborately detailed floral wallpapers and textiles. For Egan, this overload of patterns, textures, and forms is the prodromal made visible: a mind on the verge, cataloguing the world with obsessive precision before coherence gives way.
In the exhibition’s titular work, the figure of the exasperated groundskeeper, a quasi self-portrait of the artist and an entry point into the universe that Egan’s work articulates, slouches in a lawn chair in front of a wooden house guarded by neatly clipped hedges. He stares vacantly past a wrapped citrus tree near his feet, waiting to be planted. Egan skillfully vacillates between paint applications – thick impasto netting binds the fruit tree’s branches and heavily textured fabrics are draped across the figure, while an uncannily smooth floral curtain ripples in the window of the house. The scene is backlit by a dramatic fuchsia sunset that looms menacingly, its otherworldly hues amplified by smoke and atmospheric pollutants.
In Egan’s largest work in the show, Front Room, the objects and motifs that reappear in other paintings coalesce into a densely rendered vignette featuring a floral couch set against patterned wallpaper, a rug, and curtains that are slightly parted to reveal a sliver of a fluorescent sunset. Egan’s dizzying living room delineates a psychological space that is beyond tending and the all-consuming task of its maintenance is imposed on the overwhelmed groundskeeper.
Collectively, the paintings in the exhibition resist resolution, swerving between the sublime and the domestic, fixating on both sweeping visual splendor and the eerily charged banality of domestic life.
