Artist RETNA Claims an Auction House Sold His Stolen Work

Today, a Dallas-based auction house sold off what it called the “intimate” contents of the Los Angeles studio of RETNA, a graffiti artist whose hieroglyphic-like calligraphy has, over the course of three decades, appeared on streets, museum walls, the façade of a Louis Vuitton store, and the cover of a Justin Bieber album. The pitch from Heritage Auctions was awkward: “If you’ve ever visited an established artist’s longtime studio, you have essentially taken a walk through the artist’s brain. Maybe his very soul.” The materials for sale, the auctioneers note, “came to Heritage via a legal process.” At the bottom of the online auction page was a clarifying note: The sale was “conducted as an abandoned property sale in accordance with California Civil Code §§1980O.”

Yesterday, in the run-up to the auction, RETNA, whose real name is Marquis Lewis, filed a lawsuit claiming the art now in the possession of Heritage was not, in fact, abandoned but was instead stolen. According to the complaint, his former landlord illegally seized the studio’s contents, worth millions of dollars, after a five-month dispute over rent, which ultimately led to the artist’s eviction. “They have my hard drives,” RETNA said on Wednesday. “They have my computers, they have my notes, they have my safe” — plus about 500 works of art.

In the past, RETNA’s work has sold for as much as $175,000 at auction; today, the biggest-ticket item, a work in metal and spray paint, went for $42,000. But according to RETNA, much of what was up for sale — about a quarter of the 168 lots — are unfinished works, misattributed to him (created by other artists), or aren’t even artworks at all.

“This isn’t just the mishandling of an artist’s career — it’s the desecration of his legacy,” said Avery Andon, RETNA’s art dealer. A piece of canvas the artist often used as a target when clearing out his aerosol spray cans was sold as a painting (it went for $1,400). One of the real paintings, one that spells out “I LOVE U” in pink and blue letters, was made by a former girlfriend. It sold for $5,500. “Who would look at that,” RETNA asked Andon when the lots first posted, “and think I would write ‘I love you’ on a canvas with glitter?”

RETNA, who has a reputation for combative behavior, said he and his former landlord, Victor Ceporius, had a good relationship for more than a decade, but Ceporius fell ill, and a couple years ago his sister, Irena Knorr, began managing the downtown Los Angeles property. The artist failed to pay two months’ rent between 2023 and 2024, resulting in a debt of roughly $180,000, according to the lawsuit (the studio, which comprised two units in the building, rented for approximately $85,000 a month), and leaving him without access to his art and other possessions inside. After he paid what he owed, RETNA claims, Knorr effectively held his work hostage, demanding increasingly higher sums. Andon came up with around $300,000 to clear an additional debt Knorr said RETNA owed — back rent as well as storage fees — but Knorr allegedly refused to accept payment. Andon said, “When I proudly called Irena to notify her I was ready to wire the funds, she moved the goalposts to $450,000 with no explanation, financial breakdown, or accounting.” (Knorr did not respond to a request for comment.)

According to the lawsuit, this was all part of “a scheme to steal RETNA’s valuable property” and profit from it. The artist’s lawyer contends that the landlord “never intended to resolve the dispute concerning rent, falsely inflated the amount purportedly owed, refused to allow RETNA and others acting on his behalf to pay the purported amount due” so that the landlord, “with the assistance of Heritage, could realize ill-gotten gains from their blatant art theft.”

An attorney representing Heritage, Armen Vartian, said he was “satisfied that there’s nothing unlawful going on here. Heritage wouldn’t be involved in anything if it was unlawful.” He produced a court order from May that had granted the landlord possession of the materials in RETNA’s studio and a notice giving the artist 18 days to reclaim it. RETNA claims he never received that notice, perhaps because he was moving houses. He was also in jail around that time, he said. (The artist has a long history of run-ins with the law, including for allegedly vandalizing Damien Hirst’s art at a gallery and for slapping a paparazzo.) Vartian did not respond to questions about the authenticity of pieces for sale.

But RETNA’s lawyer, Brent Blakely, made clear that anyone who bought work at the sale would be sued alongside Heritage. “When a piece of artwork is stolen,” Blakely wrote in an email before the sale, “it remains stolen even if someone later unwittingly purchases it at an auction.” He hoped, however, that bidders would be deterred by their conscience: “In my opinion any true lover of RETNA’s art would be doing a disservice not only to Mr. Lewis, but the entire art community, by participating.”

For the circumstances, RETNA was surprisingly calm. “This is going to be something that I’m going to have to deal with for a very, very long time,” he said. “There’s a lot of heirloom stuff that was meaningful,” including a Dennis Hopper work he received as a gift from the estate of the actor and artist and a painting RETNA and artist El Mac made of a late friend in a casket. The auction site, RETNA said, was “hard to look at.” “There are things that are said to be collaborations with artists that I didn’t have anything to do with. The works are all just thrown all over the place, you know, shown upside down, and there’s no truth in how they represent the work.”

Most disconcerting, perhaps, was the fact that Heritage kept referring to the auction as an “estate sale.” Whether the material for sale represented his “soul” or not, he said, “Here I am still alive.”

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