"Ten years ago you could have bought one of my paintings for £2,000. I was in a back street in Soho. Nobody knew who I was. The work was the same. The hunger was the same."
Lincoln Townley (born 27 December 1972, London) is one of the most significant and commercially successful self-taught painters working in Britain today - an artist whose trajectory from the margins of Soho's nightlife economy to the walls of the Royal Academy, the Venice Biennale, and Sotheby's New York represents one of the most extraordinary stories of reinvention in contemporary British art.
Before turning to painting in his forties, Townley worked as a celebrity publicist and PR manager, eventually running nightclubs in London's Soho district - a world of excess, ambition, and self-destruction that became the primary source material for his earliest work. His immersion in that world led to a serious alcohol addiction, and it was his recovery and sobriety that unlocked his practice as a painter. The chaos, the faces, the moral complexity of the life he had led - all of it poured onto canvas with an urgency and directness that distinguished his work immediately from the polished product of formally trained contemporaries.
His first private show took place in 2012 in a back street of Soho - where an original Banker portrait could be purchased for £2,000. Within a decade, a larger oil work Dance With The Devil sold at Sotheby's New York for $378,000, and his portrait of Muhammad Ali achieved $623,000 at auction in 2017. The market had found in Townley exactly what it finds compelling: an authentic voice, a singular visual language, and a biography that is inseparable from the work.
Townley's paintings are defined by their aggressive, heavily layered surfaces - built up, scraped, and swiped with a ferocious energy that recalls Francis Bacon's radical distortions of the human figure and Frank Auerbach's thick, sculptural paint application. Sotheby's have written that his work combines "the horror and distortion of Bacon with the thick and sculptural paint application synonymous with Frank Auerbach's best portraits of the 1950s." The figures loom out of abyssal, dark backdrops - be-suited businessmen, Hollywood legends, anonymous screaming faces - each portrait an evocation of the existential pressures that drive ambition, addiction, and the hunger for recognition.
His celebrity portraits - of Al Pacino, Charlie Sheen, Michael Caine, Clint Eastwood, John Cleese, Harry Dean Stanton, Mickey Rourke, and Russell Brand, among many others - emerged naturally from his years in the nightclub and PR world, where proximity to fame had given him an intimate understanding of its psychological cost. These works are not flattering likenesses but psychological confrontations: the subject rendered in neon grids or lysergic backdrops that situate celebrity within the broader landscape of anxiety, violence, and desire that characterises his entire practice.
His institutional exhibition history is extensive. He has shown at the National Gallery, London; the Royal Academy of Arts, London (Sir Hugh Casson Room, 2015 and 2016); Somerset House, London; the Saatchi Gallery, London; the Freud Museum, London; the Brisbane Powerhouse; and galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Singapore. Between 2015 and 2017 he served as Artist in Residence at the Marriott Canary Wharf. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 2019 and 2022, and is preparing for his fourth Venice Biennale in 2026. He was commissioned by MasterCard to paint global icons and by BAFTA Los Angeles for celebrity portraits in 2016 and 2017.
In 2014 he published The Hunger - a biography documenting his journey from the margins of Soho society to international acclaim as a painter. He lives and works between London and Cheshire with his wife, television personality Denise Welch.