May 2026 — Creed Gallery, Ascot, Berkshire
There are artists who make work you admire, and there are artists who make work you cannot stop looking at. RETNA — born Marquis Lewis in Los Angeles in 1979 — belongs firmly in the second category. His calligraphic script, dense with meaning and impossible to fully decode, has migrated from the walls of downtown LA to the collections of Hollywood figures, fashion houses, and international museums. And right now, Creed Gallery holds one of the most significant collections of his work available anywhere in the UK — including exclusive large-scale originals not yet listed online, that must be seen in person to be fully understood.
If you have been following the contemporary art market, you will already know that RETNA is not a name to sleep on.
Who Is RETNA?
RETNA grew up in the Mid-City neighbourhood of Los Angeles, the son of a family with African-American, Pipil, Spanish, and Cherokee heritage. That multicultural background is not incidental to his work — it is the work. As a teenager he fell in with the city's most formidable graffiti crews, including Art Work Rebels (AWR) and Mad Society Kings (MSK), studying letterforms with the obsessive focus of a medieval scribe. The moniker RETNA came from a Wu-Tang Clan lyric, and from the beginning there was a quality to his practice that sat between the street and the sacred.
What he developed over two decades is a visual language without direct precedent. His script draws simultaneously on Egyptian hieroglyphics, Arabic and Hebrew calligraphy, Gothic blackletter, and Chicano graffiti — layered into compositions that carry the energy of urban walls and the precision of illuminated manuscripts. His messages, as he has said himself, are never meant to be accurately translated. They are felt rather than read. It is this quality — the sense of encountering something ancient and urgent at the same time — that distinguishes RETNA from every other artist working in the calligraphic or typographic tradition today.
A Career That Spans Streets, Institutions, and the World's Great Brands
RETNA's transition from street artist to gallery and institutional name has been one of the most convincing in contemporary art. His public murals appeared on the Houston Bowery Wall in New York, a 21-storey tower in Mexico City, and the façade of the Pasadena Museum of California Art. In 2011 he collaborated with Shepard Fairey and Kenny Scharf on the West Hollywood Park Murals — a commission recognised by Americans for the Arts. In 2013, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles invited him to mount a solo installation: Para mi gente. In 2016 he was featured at the San Francisco Legion of Honor alongside ancient Egyptian artefacts, his calligraphic paintings contextualised within thousands of years of mark-making history. He showed at the Venice Biennale. He designed the sets for productions of Aida at the Washington National Opera and the San Francisco Opera.
At the commercial level, his collaborators have included Louis Vuitton, Nike, Chanel, and VistaJet. He created the cover artwork for Justin Bieber's album Purpose in 2015. His collector base includes Patrick Dempsey, Usher, and figures from the upper echelons of Hollywood and the music industry. This is not an artist whose reputation rests on street credibility alone — it is backed by institutional validation, commercial reach, and a secondary market that has consistently rewarded serious collectors.
RETNA's Work at Creed Gallery: Prints, Editions & Exclusive Originals
We currently hold an exceptional selection of RETNA works at Creed Gallery — from signed limited edition prints through to works on paper and canvas. These are the entry points that allow a new collector to begin a relationship with one of the most compelling visual languages in contemporary art, with full authentication and edition documentation as standard.
But the works we are most excited about right now are not yet on the website.
We have acquired a collection of large-scale RETNA originals — significant canvases that represent the artist at his most expansive and immersive. These are the kind of works that define a room, anchor a collection, and hold their value not just financially but culturally. If you have ever stood in front of a RETNA mural on a city wall and felt the pull of that script — the sense that you are reading something you cannot quite decipher — these paintings deliver that experience on a scale that transforms a private interior into something extraordinary.
These originals are available exclusively through our gallery and we strongly encourage any serious collector to book a private viewing. Work of this scale and quality at this moment in RETNA's career does not remain available for long.
Expert Tip: Large-scale originals by an artist with RETNA's institutional track record and collector base represent a category of acquisition that is genuinely difficult to access outside of direct gallery relationships. If you are building a collection with a long horizon, this is the kind of opportunity that defines it.
The Investment Case for RETNA in 2026
The 2026 art market has made one thing very clear: capital is moving toward artists with structural credibility — deep institutional history, a recognisable and irreplaceable visual language, and a collector base that spans both cultural and commercial worlds. RETNA meets every one of those criteria.
His auction record includes a canvas that sold for $93,750, and secondary market values for his major works have appreciated consistently through the 2010s and into the current decade. More importantly, he remains an artist whose originals are still accessible at price points that, given his trajectory, look conservative in retrospect. The collectors who built positions in Banksy and Basquiat before their markets fully matured understood this dynamic. RETNA's market is at a comparable inflection point.
His work also carries the quality that the most sophisticated collectors in 2026 are specifically seeking: authenticity of voice. In a market saturated with derivative and trend-driven work, RETNA's script is genuinely his own — a visual language that took decades to develop and cannot be replicated. That is the foundation of lasting value.
For collectors who want to understand how RETNA fits within the broader context of blue-chip street art — alongside names like Banksy, Richard Hambleton, and Blek le Rat — our team is available to talk through the market context and help you build a collection with coherence and conviction.
Seeing RETNA in Person: Visit Creed Gallery Ascot
Some works demand to be seen at scale. RETNA's large originals are emphatically among them. The density of the script, the layering of colour and texture, the sense of encountering a living language — none of it fully translates to a screen. We are located in the heart of Ascot, Berkshire, and our team is available throughout the week for private viewings by appointment.
Whether you are collecting for the first time or adding a statement work to an established portfolio, we invite you to come and stand in front of these paintings. The experience will tell you everything you need to know.