Known for his graffiti based on different cultural scripts, the artist known as RETNA is a key figure of Los Angeles' graffiti and street art scene. Exhibiting his work around the world, RETNA has worked on campaigns for brands like Nike, Louis Vuitton, and Chanel.
Read MoreBorn Marquis Duriel Lewis, RETNA became involved with the Los Angeles' graffiti and mural art scene when he was in high school. His name derives from a lyric in the Wu-Tang Clan song 'Heaterz', which he adopted in 1996.
Choosing not to attend art school, RETNA instead developed his style from the graffiti he grew up with, and later from research into various ancient languages. RETNA cites influences as diverse as medieval manuscripts, Art Nouveau, and 20th-century artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Slowly transitioning from street art to fine art, RETNA's first gallery show was the group exhibition Contemporary Corruption (1999) at 01 Gallery, Los Angeles.
Aligned with Art Work Rebels, Mad Society Kings, and The Seventh Letter artist collective, RETNA continues to live and work out of Los Angeles.
Reflecting his own blended cultural heritage—with African-American, Pipil, Spanish, and Cherokee roots—RETNA seeks to create a visual language that universally resonates. RETNA's paintings, graffiti, photography, and sculpture deploy a hybrid visual language of textual forms: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Arabic calligraphy, Hebrew script, and Blackletter typeface, among their sources.
RETNA eyeballs these language codes and adapts them to his own working cryptic language. He pens personal messages, fragments of memories, and poetry in this vernacular, which remains indecipherable to all but the artist.
RETNA's acrylic on canvas work Reflection of An Argument (2016) typifies the artist's style, with its enigmatic long-letter typography. Painted with a brush in black with precise, straight edges, the painting's graffiti roots blend with fine art technique.
Reflecting deeper emotions, the title and fiery red background indicate that these indecipherable words may contain profanities and piercing statements exchanged in the heat of argument.
Some of RETNA's artworks from the late 2010s deviate from the artist's typically ordered geometric compositions.
In This One's Been Untitled (2017), overlapping layers of freely painted colour, disintegrating block letters, patches of white and scribbled cursive culminate expressively. In Margraves (2017), the artist adopts a cursive style of text that blends with a colourful, organically abstract background painted with free, sweeping brushstrokes.
RETNA has created numerous murals for public spaces in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Mexico City. In 2007, RETNA collaborated with El Mac and Reyeson on La Reina del Sur, a large-scale mural shown at Miami's Art Basel. As part of the 2011 exhibition Street Cred: Graffiti Art from Concrete to Canvas, RETNA was commissioned to paint the façade of the Pasadena Museum of California Art with his distinctive typography. The following year, he painted his typography in red and blue on the Houston Bowery mural wall in New York.
Selected for the 2018 Coney Art Walls project in New York, curated by Jeffrey Deitch and Joseph Sitt, RETNA painted a large-scale mural in his signature black and white typographic style.
The artist's recent exhibition on Ocula is Banksy, Justin Bower, Sean Crim, WYATT MILLS, Retna, Sol Summers, James Verbicky at Maddox Gallery, Los Angeles (2 September—31 October 2021).
In addition to this exhibition, the artist has participated in the following select solo exhibitions: La Cuenta Larga, MAIA Contemporary, Mexico City (2018); Margraves, Maddox Gallery, London (2017); RETNA: Para mi gente, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles (2013); and RETNA: The Hallelujah World Tour, Andy Valmorbida & Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld, New York (2011).
Retna has also participated in the following select group exhibtions: The Future of the Past: Mummies and Medicine, Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco (2016); The Boneyard Project: Return Trip, PIMA Art and Space Museum, Tucson (2012); Art in the Streets, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011); and Street Cred: Graffiti Art from Concrete to Canvas, Pasadena Museum of California Art (2011).
Many of RETNA's prints and paintings have done well at auction. His most expensive painting sold at auction to date was Untitled (2011), which sold for US $48,000 at Phillips in 2014. Earlier works such as Shadows of Light (2012) and Sad to See (2012) have sold for approximately US $30,000
Expanding into the NFT market, RETNA released his first Cryptograph work, Earth, in 2020 to raise funds for environmental causes.
On Ocula, the artists is represented by Maddox Gallery. Recent exhibitions hosted by Maddox Gallery include Spring Contemporary (2021).
RETNA's website can be found here and his Instagram can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2021
