Retna

Life and work

Marquis Duriel Lewis, who signs his work RETNA, was born in Los Angeles in 1979 and still works there. He came out of the city's graffiti crews in the years when writing on walls was mostly a nocturnal trade, and he built from that beginning a script of his own. It borrows the proportions of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the flow of Arabic and Hebrew letterforms, the weight of Gothic blackletter and the geometry of Chicano lettering from Los Angeles. The result reads as language without being readable, and it is the single thing collectors buy him for. He belongs to the crews known as Art Work Rebels, Mad Society Kings and The Seventh Letter. His public commissions include the West Hollywood Park murals of 2011, painted alongside Shepard Fairey and Kenny Scharf, and he filled the galleries of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles with an environment of his script in 2013. In 2016 his designs carried a staging of Verdi at the San Francisco Opera.

Disciplines and how they differ

The market for this artist is overwhelmingly a market for painting on canvas. Acrylic on canvas is the standard, sometimes with enamel and with a glitter medium the house catalogues call crystallina. Scale drives everything. Canvases approaching two and a half metres on a side are placed in live evening and day sales, while small formats around ninety centimetres go into timed online sales. Works on paper and screenprints exist and trade well below the canvases. Murals, which are what most people know him for, are attached to buildings owned by other parties and do not come to market. LLB Auction has sold four lots by him, all of which found buyers.

What a specialist examines

The signature is normally on the reverse rather than on the face. Expect an inscription there in the artist's own hand, often the title, the year and a place name, sometimes a whole sentence. The front may carry nothing but the script itself. A specialist reads the density and the rhythm of the lettering, since the vocabulary tightened as the studio practice matured, and compares the ground preparation and the edges of the stretcher with documented examples. Condition points follow the medium. Spray and enamel passages can lift or crack, glitter grounds shed, and large unglazed canvases pick up surface dirt and stretcher marks. Provenance matters more than usual, because many canvases went straight from the studio to a private collection without passing through a gallery. No body that reviews works for sellers is listed under Career, so the paperwork a seller holds carries the weight.

Market position

The public record sits mainly with Phillips, which has offered his work in New York, London and Hong Kong. In Hong Kong in 2023 a large canvas in enamel, acrylic and crystallina made HKD 762,000. In New York in 2024 an untitled canvas roughly two and a half metres wide made USD 88,900, and in 2023 a square canvas titled This is Show Business made USD 69,850. In London in 2024 the canvas Los Banditos made GBP 40,640. Earlier, in 2022, Electrify the City made USD 75,600 in New York. At the small end an untitled canvas of about ninety centimetres made USD 21,930 in a timed online sale that closed in 2026. Each of those figures includes the buyer's premium as the house prints it.

What a seller should have ready

Photographs of the front, of the whole reverse and of the inscription in close detail, since the reverse is where the artist writes. The exact dimensions in centimetres and the medium as far as it can be told. The purchase invoice or any document showing where the work came from, especially if it was bought from the studio directly. Any gallery correspondence, shipping paperwork or exhibition label still attached to the stretcher. A recent condition report if the surface carries glitter or spray passages. Photographs taken in raking light will show stretcher marks and lifting better than flat light. If the work is a print, the edition number and the publisher's blindstamp.