RETNA
Invented an alphabet from Arabic, Hebrew, blackletter and Los Angeles graffiti, and made it unreadable.
RETNA is Marquis Lewis, born in Los Angeles in 1979, who came up through the city's graffiti scene in the 1990s and built from it a script of his own: tall, elegant, densely packed characters that draw on Arabic calligraphy, Hebrew, Egyptian hieroglyph, blackletter and West Coast cholo lettering. It reads as writing and is not decipherable to anyone but him, which is the point. He has painted enormous murals, collaborated on the exterior of the Bowery Wall and with Louis Vuitton and Nike, and designed an album cover for Justin Bieber.
Unique paintings on canvas lead the market, generally in acrylic and enamel on a monochrome ground, with scale and density of the script the main drivers. Below them are screenprints and hand-finished editions, released in runs of around fifty to two hundred, where the presence and extent of hand-work is what distinguishes impressions and should be documented. Because the imagery is essentially calligraphic and widely reproduced, imitations circulate; studio documentation and provenance to a gallery source carry real weight. Matt unvarnished surfaces mark easily.
If you own a work by RETNA
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.