Lincoln Townley

Lincoln Townley was born on 27 December 1972. Wikipedia and IMDb place his birth in Hackney, London, England, while The Artling instead gives Manchester and a birth year of 1971; this profile follows the higher-corroboration sources for both the date and the London birthplace. He is consistently described across gallery and press profiles as a self-taught painter, with no documented formal art school training. Before turning to painting, he worked in public relations and nightclub marketing, an early career he has said informs the psychological focus of his portraits of power and success.

Townley's exhibition history includes a display at the Royal Academy in London, a 2017 retrospective at the Saatchi Gallery, and his first Australian exhibition, The Surprise Collection, at the Brisbane Powerhouse with REDSEA Gallery, also in 2017. He went on to show a "Banker Collection" in Venice Biennale collateral exhibitions at the Palazzo Bembo in 2019, 2022, and 2024, with a fourth presentation at the Palazzo Bembo and Palazzo Mora announced for 2026. He has received portrait commissions connected to Mastercard and BAFTA Los Angeles, though further details of those commissions are not independently confirmed. He lives in Cheshire and in London.

Townley's public profile has been shaped more by gallery marketing, private collectors, and celebrity association than by coverage in major art-critical outlets. No verified assessment from a named professional art critic at a major newspaper or magazine was confirmed in the course of this research, and specific quotes attributed to collectors or dealers could not be independently corroborated for this profile.

Townley's best documented auction result is Dance With The Devil, reported to have sold for USD 378,000 at Sotheby's New York; the exact sale date and year have not been independently confirmed. MutualArt reports realized prices reaching that same USD 378,000 ceiling for paintings and up to USD 25,397 for prints, while a separate database, FindArtInfo, lists a much lower highest realized price of USD 9,184 across 10 or more tracked auction results; the two figures have not been reconciled in the sources reviewed. Higher figures for individual works, including a reported USD 623,000 for a portrait of Muhammad Ali, have circulated in the press but lack a confirmed auction house, location, and date, and are not treated here as an established record.

Townley's market shows a wider than usual gap between exhibition visibility and institutional validation. He has shown work at prominent London venues, including the Saatchi Gallery and the Royal Academy, and at Venice Biennale collateral exhibitions, but no museum has been confirmed to hold his work in a permanent collection. The venues listed reflect display history, not acquisitions. There is no catalogue raisonne, and no certificate-of-authenticity program has been documented, so provenance should be checked directly with his current galleries. Basic biographical facts, including his birth year and birthplace, are reported inconsistently across sources (1971 Manchester versus 1972 London), and his auction history is thin, with only a small number of tracked lots and inconsistent price ceilings reported across databases, so any single sale, high or low, should be weighed with caution rather than treated as a stable benchmark.