Lincoln Townley

Exhibiting Artist: Lincoln Townley

Lincoln Townley’s figurative portraits loom out of abyssal backdrops and emerge directly into our own space.

The heavily layered paintings are built-up, scraped and swiped with an aggressive and expressive vigour. Sotheby’s say: “Townley combines the horror and distortion of Bacon with the thick and sculptural paint application synonymous with Frank Auerbach’s best portraits of the 1950s.”1 His paintings reflect his fearlessness as an artist and the ferocious energy with which he paints.

Ten years ago, at his first private show in a back street of London's Soho in 2012, you could have purchased an original Townley Banker portrait for £2,000. A decade on, a larger oil work, ‘Dance With The Devil’, recently sold at Sotheby’s auction in New York for USD 378,000.

His paintings are exhibited across the world, most recently at a sell-out Venice Biennale exhibition during 2022.