Honor Titus

Honor Titus was born on July 18, 1989, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Andres "Dres" Titus, a member of the rap group Black Sheep. He has no documented formal art school training; multiple profiles describe him as self-taught, having come to painting only after relocating to Los Angeles in 2016, where he continues to live and work.

His first solo exhibition was held at Henry Taylor Gallery in Los Angeles in January 2020. Timothy Taylor announced its representation of Titus in February 2021, and gave him his first New York solo show, For Heaven's Sake, that year, followed by a solo presentation at Frieze London and a London solo exhibition, Bourgeoisie in Bloom, running from November 2022 to January 2023. In 2023 he opened his first solo exhibition with Gagosian, Advantage In, at the gallery's Beverly Hills space, and had his first solo institutional show in China, Ornamental Distance, at the Longlati Foundation in Shanghai. In 2025 an enlarged reproduction of his painting Louis Malle Practice was installed on the facade of the Queens Museum in connection with the US Open.

Critical attention has followed Titus's rapid gallery trajectory, with profiles in the New York Times, GQ, and other major outlets tracking his path from a self-taught painter to gallery representation by Timothy Taylor and a solo show at Gagosian within a few years. Writers have consistently framed his work around figurative scenes of leisure and aspiration, tennis courts, jazz radios, and interiors, read as chronicles of Black middle-class and bourgeois life, and have placed him within a broader lineage of intimate, narrative figuration. The critical conversation so far centers on the strength of that early institutional reception relative to a still-limited public sales record.

Titus's clearest auction result is Linden Blvd Jazz Radio, an oil on canvas from 2019, which sold for USD 163,800 at Phillips New York on November 17, 2021, in the 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Other Phillips results for his work, in British pounds and Hong Kong dollars, have come in well below that figure. Christie's has also offered at least one work, Clay Court, though the sale price for that lot is not confirmed in available records. Taken together, his secondary market is small, concentrated mainly at Phillips, and still forming.

Titus is an early-career artist: his gallery program, representation by Timothy Taylor plus a solo exhibition at Gagosian, is well ahead of his auction history, which currently consists of a small number of results concentrated at Phillips, topped by the $163,800 sale of Linden Blvd Jazz Radio in 2021. There is no catalogue raisonne, and given the short exhibition history, provenance and gallery documentation carry particular weight. Collectors should treat the thin auction sample as an early-stage signal rather than an established price trend.