Black Lust II
View Similar Items
RETNABlack Lust II2023
2023
About the Item
RETNA
Born Marquis Lewis on March 24, 1979, in Los Angeles, CA, Retna joined the Los Angeles mural scene as a teenager.
As a youth of African-American, El Salvadorian and Cherokee descent growing up in Los Angeles, Retna was mesmerized by the gang graffiti that surrounded him. He began practicing the art form and adopted the name Retna from a Wu-Tang Clan song. In the mid-nineties, he began making murals on walls, trains and freeway overpasses throughout the city.
Retna transformed from a street artist to a break-out star in the contemporary art world. He garnered attention from Usher, an R&B artist, who commissioned the artist to create a portrait of Marvin Gaye, and MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch, who wrote in the September 2010 issue of Juxtapoz “one of the most exciting exhibitions...this year, anywhere, was Retna's exhibition at New Image Art.” MOCA also featured Retna's work in the major “Art in the Streets” exhibit, the first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti and street art.
At first glance, Retna’s prints and paintings look like an undiscovered ancient script: a series of hypnotic symbols — complex, beautiful and captivating. But he has created an original alphabet, fusing together influences from ancient Incan and Egyptian hieroglyphics, Arabic, Asian calligraphy, graffiti, blackletter, Roman lettering and Hebrew script.
Each piece carries meaning, conveying an event or dialogue that the artist experienced. The writing does not belong to a particular language. Retna explains, “I want my text to feel universal. I want people from different cultures to all find some similarity in it — whether they can read it or not.” He has also stated that “it is important to have art in the streets as a cultural fabric that is woven into the city for the upliftment of civic pride.”
Retna’s works are in the private collections of Jeffrey Deitch, Swizz Beats, Usher, and Dave Chappelle, among many others. His large-scale mural across the eastern exterior of Restoration Hardware’s new gallery in West Palm, Florida, was valued at $500,000 by the city’s Art in Public Places program.
Retna has collaborated with major fashion brands including Nike, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Helmut Lang, and designed the artwork for Justin Bieber’s Purpose album cover. RETNA also acted as the artistic designer for the San Francisco and Washington National Opera’s production of “Aida."
Find original Retna art on 1stDibs.
(Biography provided by New Union Gallery)
- Beijing Spring PinkBy Karen SilveLocated in Solana Beach, CAKaren Silve developed an interest in Post-Impressionist and Fauvist painting, and they informed her early figurative abstractions. She studied in the graduate painting and design programs at the University of Denver, creating abstract work that was inspired by the landscape and by the color lessons she learned in France. Later, the Abstract Expressionist painters Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, and the German artist Gerhard Richter became important influences on her work. In 1993, Silve moved to Portland, Oregon, worked in graphic design and began to explore painterly process in a series of meditative paintings. In the late 1990s, she created two extended groups of paintings, first the Musician Series, and then the Cellist Series. Both series focused on players with their instrument, and on a feeling for music expressed through abstracting the human figure, gestural brush strokes and vibrant color. After this she moved on to rhythmic, calligraphic brush strokes and drips of paint. Evolving from this period is the ongoing series of abstract paintings that Silve continues to create. Silve has exhibited her work extensively in solo exhibitions including at the Portland Performing Arts Center, the Forsyth Center Gallery at Texas A&M University, the Visual Art Center of Northwest Florida, the Tuscaloosa Performing Arts Center and the West Linn Public Library in Oregon. Group exhibitions include those at The Institute for American Universities, Aix-in-Provence, France, the Jemison-Carnegie Heritage Hall...Category
2010s Abstract Abstract Paintings
MaterialsCanvas, Acrylic
- Poem for Ezra Pound and Kurt CobainBy Robert MontgomeryLocated in Solana Beach, CAInspired by the graffiti artists of East London, the poetry of Philip Larkin, the philosophy of Guy Debord, and the French student protesters of May 1968, Robert Montgomery’s text-ba...Materials
Gesso, Paint, Wood
Price Upon Request - Seattle Poem (Deciduous Knowledge)By Robert MontgomeryLocated in Solana Beach, CAInspired by the graffiti artists of East London, the poetry of Philip Larkin, the philosophy of Guy Debord, and the French student protesters of May 1968, Robert Montgomery’s text-ba...Materials
Gesso, Paint, Wood
Price Upon Request - Poem for Ezra Pound and Kurt CobainBy Robert MontgomeryLocated in Solana Beach, CAInspired by the graffiti artists of East London, the poetry of Philip Larkin, the philosophy of Guy Debord, and the French student protesters of May 1968, Robert Montgomery’s text-ba...Category
21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Drawings and Watercolors
MaterialsWatercolor
Price Upon Request - Money is a SuperstitionBy Robert MontgomeryLocated in Solana Beach, CAInspired by the graffiti artists of East London, the poetry of Philip Larkin, the philosophy of Guy Debord, and the French student protesters of May 1968, Robert Montgomery’s text-ba...Category
21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Sculptures
MaterialsPlywood, LED Light, Polymer
- A Hundred YearsBy Robert MontgomeryLocated in Solana Beach, CAInspired by the graffiti artists of East London, the poetry of Philip Larkin, the philosophy of Guy Debord, and the French student protesters of May 1968, Robert Montgomery’s text-ba...Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Abstract Sculptures
MaterialsOak, Polymer, LED Light
- American Flag OUR FLAG Pop Art Acrylic PaintingBy Martin HoffmanLocated in Surfside, FLsigned with initials verso and a stamp Kooter Boogers of America. with an intentionally distressed surface. please see photos. Martin Hoffman, a prominent artist whose work in the 1970s was simultaneously identified with high art (gritty realist paintings sold through the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York) and low (illustrations for Playboy magazine). Throughout his career, his style ranged from energetic abstraction and hard-edge pop to photo-based realism and minimalism. In recent years, he created a series of autobiographical paintings in a winsome, cartoon-like style. He also did a series of subtly hued works in which inscrutable words half-disappear into the paint in which they are inscribed. Hoffman’s first job out of college was as art director for the Miami News, a position that he held from 1956 until 1962. Afterward he worked as a graphic designer in Miami while making paintings at home in his spare time. His earliest paintings (which were done, he said, as a “testosterone-driven teenager”) were executed in automotive lacquer on 4 x 8 foot sheets of builder’s hardboard. They combined glossy, visceral surfaces and metallic paints with collaged-on metal shapes and mirrors. In the 1960s, Hoffman’s paintings began to incorporate figures and symbolism with erotic undertones. Through a mutual friend, Sidney Janis saw Hoffman’s paintings and selected one of them for his international “Erotic Art ‘66” exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. Others in the show included Pop Art icons Jim Dine, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselman. Hoffman’s painting hung besides an Andy Warhol silkscreen painting of a partially peeled banana. From 1966 to 1992, Hoffman was a freelance Playboy illustrator. He called those years “a wonderful period – it supported my family.” Hoffman painted a series of nudes titled “Woman Eternal” which was featured in Playboy’s December 1972 issue. Through the years, he also created illustrations for books, record albums, movie posters and print ads. Clients included Pfizer, Caesar’s Palace, Harley Davidson Motorcycles and the NASA Art Program, which commissioned a series of works based on activities at the former Kennedy Space Center...Category
1970s Pop Art Still-life Paintings
MaterialsCanvas, Acrylic
- VEDRA IBIZA No.2 Large Abstract Expressionist Color Field Acrylic PaintingBy Lamar BriggsLocated in Surfside, FLsize is without frame. This is being sold without frame. Bright, vivid, large Abstract Expressionist color field painting. Similar in manner t the colorful abstract works of Paul Jen...Category
1980s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Paintings
MaterialsAcrylic, Archival Paper
- Street Art Outsider Art Painting Abstract Cityscape with DogsLocated in Surfside, FLDone in a manner reminiscent of Keith Haring and LA Ortiz.Category
Late 20th Century Street Art Abstract Paintings
MaterialsAcrylic
- NAMO EK YOGE, Abstract Geometric Rainbow Composition PaintingBy Jeet AulakhLocated in Surfside, FLBorn and raised in India, Canadian Contemporary artist Jeet Aulakh participates in a rich and varied cultural and social history in which notions of humanity are indivisible into secular and spiritual realms. A central theme in Indian philosophy is the ultimate release from the subservience of life and all its contingent aspects: to be detached from life by the realization of the “absolute supreme principle”, which is itself beyond definition. The goal is to achieve, through inner realization, a reintegration into this indefinable absolute realm. Aulakh ably depicts this other abstract realm through the use of floating circles of saturated colour seemingly floating in the dark to evoke cosmic cycles in which human history and individual identity is peripheral. The radiant world of the enraptured, disembodied soul is undiminished by this enveloping cosmic darkness. His images suggest a cosmic egg...Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Abstract Paintings
MaterialsCanvas, Acrylic
- JESTERS LAMENT XI 1963 Abstract Expressionist Painting Tibor de Nagy GalleryBy Richard Tum SudenLocated in Surfside, FLsize includes frame 20X20 sight size. Richard tum Suden (1936, Brooklyn NY) Painter, sculptor, graphic artist, has taught at Parsons School of Design in New York, Art Students League...Category
1960s Abstract Abstract Paintings
MaterialsCanvas, Synthetic Resin, Acrylic
- Untitled Acrylic and Marker Outsider Art Surrealist DreamscapeBy Hilda ArveyLocated in Surfside, FLHilda Arvey started painting at the age of 70. Self Taught, Art Brut, Outsider artist. Mother of celebrated Chicago artist Phyllis Kresnoff.Category
Mid-20th Century Outsider Art Abstract Paintings
MaterialsAcrylic, Permanent Marker