Heritage Auctions is staging a sale of the contents of the downtown Los Angeles street artist RETNA. The artist, already known for a troubled history, fell behind on the rent and the landlord, Aaron von Ossko, won a legal judgment that, under the Golden State’s civil code, allows him to treat the contents of the artist’s studio as abandoned property.
RETNA, whose given name is Marquis Lewis, grew up in Mid-City Los Angeles; the downtown studio was a popular spot for his peers to gather even as, Heritage points out in press materials, the neighborhood has gentrified to the extent that a new outpost of Soho House has opened just down the block.
Heritage holds the record for a sale of RETNA’s work: $175,000 for the acrylic painting They Can’t Come (2015), in 2020. Seven works by the artist have cleared the $100,000 mark at auction, all since 2020.
RETNA, untitled, undated. Courtesy Heritage Auctions.
The studio’s contents, by comparison, offer a potentially much more affordable way to collect his work, with several lots bearing his trademark geometric script, informed by not only traditional urban graffiti but also Arabic and Hebrew calligraphy and ancient Egyptian and old-world hieroglyphics, being bid on in the four- and five-digit range at the time of writing. The sale encompasses some 166 lots, all offered with no reserve.
The two-dimensional works are joined by some of RETNA’s sculptures, namely earthenware creatures with fearsome features, standing 16 inches high (current bid: $1) and a floor lamp emblazoned with his designs (current bid: $170).
Want a 2007 Sante d’Orazio portrait of Damien Hirst, posing in a priest’s outfit? Current bid: $1. Do your tastes lean more toward music memorabilia? How about a 1975 photo by Kim Gottlieb-Walker of George Harrison meeting Bob Marley backstage at the Roxy? That’s in there too, with a current bid of $1.
RETNA, untitled, undated. Courtesy Heritage Auctions.
Among the other high-estimated lots are an untitled pencil-on-paper work by fellow Angeleno Wes Lang, tagged at $3,100, and a Shepard Fairey mixed-media on canvas, Late Hour Riot (2018), for $2,300. Works by Cleon Peterson, Miss Van (Vanessa Alice), Retna x Crome, and photographer Martha Cooper (two photos show Keith Haring at work) are also among the haul.
A Robert Mapplethorpe photo bears a price tag set at just $55.
And if you are looking for something on a truly minute budget, some items have a current bid of $0. And that includes a four-foot-high canvas by hot artist Naudline Pierre, the subject of a recent show at James Cohan Gallery in New York, whose current auction record (from among just two works that have come to auction) is $50,800, set at Phillips New York in 2023 for the painting BLT (2016).
“This auction offers a rare and intimate journey into the creative universe of RETNA,” said Taylor Curry, Heritage’s director of Modern and contemporary art in New York. “From his iconic canvases to the personal treasures he surrounded himself with, each piece tells a story of an artist who transformed calligraphy and urban art into a language uniquely his own. This is more than an auction—it’s an opportunity to step inside the mind of a cultural trailblazer and celebrate the symbols that define his legacy.”
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