Lincoln Townley at Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary 2026 - Presented by KLEIN
Presented by KLEIN
Palm Beach has always understood a certain kind of ambition. The city wears its wealth openly, unapologetically — and it was against that backdrop that Lincoln Townley brought fourteen new paintings to Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary in 2026, in what marks his first solo presentation on American soil.
That distinction matters. Lincoln has shown in the United States before — with DeBuck Gallery at the New York Armory in 2025, and with Long-Sharp Gallery at Art Miami in 2022 — but Palm Beach was different. This was his work, in its own space, making its own argument. Fourteen paintings, one conversation.
The Work
The paintings presented at Palm Beach are drawn from the ongoing body of practice that has defined Lincoln's studio for several years: the Banker series. These are not portraits in any conventional sense. The figures — suited, anonymous, their faces dissolved into spirals and fractures of heavy impasto — function as archetypes rather than individuals. They embody the structures of power that govern contemporary life: capital, authority, the architecture of ambition and its attendant costs. They are recognisable and yet deliberately unidentifiable, simultaneously universal and deeply unsettling.
The fourteen works that made up the Palm Beach presentation each approach this subject from a distinct angle. The Power in the Heart of the City anchors the series with its scorched orange field and target-like face collapsing inward under pressure — a painting that radiates both dominance and fragility. The blue-drenched Legacy Play depicts a figure in a state of slow unravelling, the paint dragged and cascading as though the surface itself is giving way. Before the Dawn holds a different register entirely — burnt orange and deep magenta meeting in something close to a held breath, a moment suspended between resolution and collapse.
The triptych The Heat of Miami Ambition — three figures blazing against infernal red and amber grounds — brought a particular intensity to the presentation. Shown as a sequence, the works build a cumulative psychological weight that individual canvases cannot achieve alone. There is something entirely appropriate about those paintings finding an audience in South Florida: they were painted with that kind of heat in mind.
Elsewhere in the presentation, Privilege Without Guilt brings a jarring chromatic confidence to its subject — the vivid green suit and molten orange ground demanding attention while the face remains evasive and fractured. Master Asset pushes furthest into darkness, its figure emerging from near-black with green and red impasto of extraordinary density. Banker's Decision and Banker's Flame explore the toll of power rather than its performance — the latter dissolving the suited figure almost entirely, the body becoming indistinguishable from the scorched ground around it. Banker's New Horizons, Soho's Fractured Facades, In the Grip of Success in London, and The Dawn of Success complete a presentation that functions, collectively, as a psychological map of contemporary power: what it looks like, what it costs, and what it conceals beneath the surface.
The Critical Context
The critical conversation around Lincoln's work has drawn inevitable, and considered, comparisons to the great figures of British figurative painting. Emma Baker, Head of Evening Auctions at Sotheby's London, has placed the Banker series in direct dialogue with Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach — describing the paintings as combining Bacon's distortion and psychological horror with the thick, sculptural paint application synonymous with Auerbach's finest portraits of the 1950s.
It is a lineage Lincoln neither avoids nor overstates. What Bacon did to the Pope — using a figure of absolute institutional authority to lay bare the psychology beneath — Lincoln is doing to the Banker. The suit has replaced the cassock. Capital has replaced the church. The existential tension is the same. In this sense, the work is not imitation but extension: a continuation of a distinctly British inquiry into power, updated for the world we actually inhabit.
Each canvas is built from months of layered oil paint, applied and reworked with palette knives and unconventional tools, using the finest pigments available. These are not smooth surfaces. They resist easy looking. They demand time — and reward it.
I didn't choose the Banker as a subject because of any interest in finance. I chose it because the Banker is one of the most legible symbols of power we have right now, but they're built on such fragile foundations. These figures carry everything — ambition, fear, moral compromise, the weight of decisions made behind closed doors. I want to get inside that, to paint the thing underneath the suit.
Represented by KLEIN
The Palm Beach presentation was made possible through Lincoln's partnership with KLEIN, the Manchester-based artist production studio founded by David Klein in 2005. Built on two decades of relationships between artists and collectors, KLEIN now represents Lincoln at international fairs and across a growing global collector network. London Art Fair and Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary in 2026 mark the opening chapters of that partnership, with ambitions extending toward Art Basel Paris.
For collectors, these paintings offer something beyond the decorative. Built from months of sustained physical and intellectual labour, they are works that carry real material weight — in the paint itself, in the decisions embedded within each surface, and in the art-historical conversation they enter. They are paintings that will look different in five years than they do today, not because they will have changed, but because the viewer will have.
To enquire about works from the Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary 2026 presentation, or to discuss future acquisitions, please contact KLEIN (info@kleineditions.com).
