Retna

Marquis Lewis, who works as RETNA, was born in Los Angeles in 1979 and began writing on the streets of the city in the early 1990s, coming up through the Los Angeles graffiti scene and its crews. The name is taken from a Wu-Tang Clan lyric. He has spent his career developing a single idea to an unusual degree of resolution.

That idea is a script. Retna has built an invented alphabet by combining the structures of several historic writing systems — Egyptian hieroglyphs, Hebrew, Arabic calligraphy, blackletter, Native American pictograms and the cholo lettering of Los Angeles — into a set of characters that behave like a language and read as one, but which cannot be read. The letters are laid out in even horizontal registers, tightly spaced, usually black or metallic on a light ground, and they carry the visual authority of scripture, inscription or legal document.

What the work does with that authority is its real subject. The paintings look like they mean something specific and withhold it, so that the viewer is returned to the surface: to the discipline of the line, the rhythm of the intervals, the sheer labour of a hand-drawn text made without error at wall scale. Meaning is present as form. The pieces that do encode text — and some do — give no indication of which they are.

He works at every scale, from canvas to buildings, and the script has appeared on gallery walls, murals, an aircraft, and commercial collaborations. The consistency of the vocabulary means the work reads as continuous whether it is painted illegally or commissioned.

His work was included in Art in the Streets at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2011, the exhibition that consolidated the field's institutional standing, and is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He has exhibited internationally, including recent solo and group presentations with JD Malat Gallery in London.

SELECTED CV

Born 1979, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Education and Training

Self-taught

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2025 Locked Lines, JD Malat Gallery, London, United Kingdom

2017 Margraves, Maddox Gallery, London, United Kingdom

2008 Mid-City Arts, Los Angeles, CA, USA

The Hallelujah World Tour, New York, NY, USA

L.A. Art Machine, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Don Gallery, Milan, Italy

Yves Laroche Galerie d’Art, Montreal, Canada

Art for All, Málaga, Spain

Selected Group Exhibitions

2026 Elements of Light, JD Malat Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Contemporary Corruption, 01 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Museum and Institutional Exhibitions

2011 Art in the Streets, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Selected Public Commissions and Projects

Monument, Mural, RH West Palm, West Palm Beach, FL, USA

Commissioned murals in New York, Miami, Mexico City and Los Angeles