Update 1.73 added 27 paintings that players can display in their mansions or lift during the Kortz Center Heist itself. Rockstar did not draw attention to what those paintings contained, but within hours of the update going live, the community was pulling them apart. Kotaku reported the findings, RockstarINTEL catalogued all 27, and GTA BOOM, Sportskeeda, and Deltia's Gaming each documented the references in detail.
The GTA 6 nods are distributed across several pieces. The primary heist target, 'La Dernière Débauche,' which pays GTA$1,925,000, has a figure layout that players quickly overlaid against fan-assembled maps of Leonida, and the outlines match. A painting titled 'Trust' depicts a diner robbery, which ties directly to the 2022 leak showing Jason and Lucia robbing a restaurant and to the moment in the first official GTA 6 trailer where both characters say 'Trust' to each other. A third piece puts an armed couple in a diner scene that mirrors Edward Hopper's 'Nighthawks,' reading as another Jason-and-Lucia reference. One of the heist NPCs, a counterfeiter named Yong-Rae, wears a necklace that matches Cal Hampton's, a confirmed GTA 6 character shown in the June screenshots.
The wider set of paintings covers the whole GTA timeline, with references to Niko Bellic and Roman from GTA 4, CJ and the Grove Street crew from San Andreas, Lester Crest and Chop from GTA 5, and Dutch Van Der Linde from Red Dead Redemption 2. The franchise first that GTA BOOM flagged is a painting referencing Albert and Archie Crisp, the twin villains of GTA: London 1969. That game shipped in 1999 as an expansion pack and its named characters have never appeared in any HD universe title until now. Rockstar has not commented on any of the references.