مجموعة: Lincoln Townley | Psychological Expressionism

Lincoln Townley (b. 1971) is one of the most commercially significant British painters of his generation — an artist whose Skull Banker series has attracted collectors including Al Pacino, Sylvester Stallone, and Robbie Williams, and whose work has sold through Sotheby's, Christie's, and Bonhams with consistent secondary market strength.

Sotheby's London have written that Townley's figurative paintings are "fictive portrayals drawn entirely from the artist's imagination. The head and shoulders portraits depict be-suited businessmen sporting viscerally painted faces that loom out of abyssal backdrops and emerge directly into our own space. They are an evocative depiction of greed within the world's financial institutions and the 'money men' behind them." The comparison Sotheby's reach for is Francis Bacon — Townley's figures making "manifest the existential turmoil of our Twenty-First Century moment."

Townley describes his own practice as psychological expressionism: painting not what his subjects look like but what they cost. The Skull Banker works — mixed media canvases of considerable physical presence, built through sessions of concentrated physical and emotional engagement — are among the most formally ambitious works in contemporary British portraiture. His 2025 Banker Study series, works on paper that reveal the compositional and psychological thinking behind the finished canvases, are available exclusively through Creed Gallery, Ascot.

Works available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London. Private viewings by appointment.