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 Director Emma Baker gives her view as, “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.” His paintings reflect his fearlessness as an artist and the ferocious energy with which he paints.
At the centre of Lincoln Townley’s latest collection stands a suite of six new London Banker paintings - rare works that capture the pulse of the city that has defined his life and practice.
For Townley, London is not a setting but a state of mind: a city of ambition and consequence, where wealth, risk and survival coexist. His own experience of the volatile energy of the capital animates Townley’s sweeping brushstrokes and impacted layers of oil. The London Bankers are not portraits in any conventional sense - they embody the collective force of a metropolis driven by appetite and competition. Faces emerge from darkness with intensity, their surfaces layered and fractured, evoking both the seduction and the cost of success.
Colour plays its own symbolic role. Rich swathes of pigment suggest the allure of money and power, while bruised tones speak to the human cost beneath the glossy veneer. These canvases are not sentimental reflections of London, but raw interpretations of the forces that make it what it is: unforgiving, seductive, endlessly alive.
Presented for the first time at the London Art Fair 2026, these six canvases mark a defining statement within Townley’s ongoing exploration of power, identity and the human condition. They will remain testaments to the city’s power - and to Townley’s ability to turn its energy into art that endures.
