Singapore 2025

“The Banker’s Journey” exhibition was a peek into @lincolntownley’s decade-long Bankers Collection, which turns a ruthless eye upon these suit-and-tie symbols of the financial world.

Largely self-taught, the British artist only began to seriously pursue art in his forties, after renouncing the hedonistic excesses of the nightclub promotion scene. Energetic yet chilling, his abstract oil paintings have often drawn comparison to the viscerally unsettling oeuvre of Francis Bacon, a canonical Irish-born painter active in the mid-twentieth century.

In this series, the faces of Townley’s subjects are covered in globs and spirals of paint, often so thickly applied as to jut off the canvas into 3D space. He doesn’t pull his punches: some of the portraits look straight out of a horror movie. Yet, there’s a delicious, if discomfiting, irony in the fact that — as the artist has previously noted in interviews — the subjects of his ire are often also the collectors of his art.

Reflecting Townley’s fascination with greed, excess, and desire, each portrait swirls around a hollow, a void; viewers are left to wonder if these men without faces are also men without hearts.