The Connor Brothers: Beautiful Fictions
In the work of The Connor Brothers, fiction becomes a way of investigating the present. Their works use familiar images, sharp phrases and a deliberately recognizable aesthetic to question the way we construct stories, desires, fears and identities.
Behind the name The Connor Brothers are British artists Mike Snelle and James Golding. The project initially began under a pseudonym, as a fictional identity and a space of creative freedom, at a complex personal moment far removed from any market strategy. Before establishing themselves as artists, Snelle and Golding had worked in the art world as dealers; they therefore knew from within its mechanisms, its rhetoric, its fragilities and its often ambiguous relationship with value, image and narrative.
The beginning of the project has something deeply coherent with their poetics. As they explained in an interview, The Connor Brothers emerged almost by chance, as a kind of private joke between friends, created during a difficult period and without any initial intention of being shown publicly.
“It was really just a private joke between us, and not intended to ever be shown in the outside world.”
The Connor Brothers
Courtesy: The Connor Brothers
This intimate, ironic and almost clandestine origin helped define the nature of their work. For years, The Connor Brothers were presented as two brothers raised within a Californian Christian cult called “The Family”, a completely invented biography that became part of the work itself. When the artists revealed their identity in 2014, that gesture did not weaken the project, but made its conceptual structure even clearer: their entire practice revolves around the relationship between truth, fiction and credibility.
Their language is based on a highly recognizable use of image and text. Their visual references evoke pulp novel covers, twentieth-century editorial aesthetics, female figures drawn from cinematic and literary imagery, vintage illustration and the codes of popular culture. To these apparently familiar images, the artists associate short, often paradoxical phrases, capable of shifting the meaning of the work in an unexpected direction.
The Connor Brothers
Courtesy: The Connor Brothers
Much of the strength of The Connor Brothers lies in this encounter between image and word. Their works seem to come from another time, yet they speak with precision about the present: anxiety, desire, fragility, love, addiction, loneliness and the need for recognition. The text does not simply accompany the image; it unsettles it, complicates it, makes it more unstable. It is precisely within this tension that meaning begins to emerge.
One of the most representative phrases in their universe is:
“I’d rather have a beautiful fiction than an unremarkable truth.”
This statement captures much of their work. Fiction is not treated as escapism, but as a tool through which to make visible something that, in reality, often remains confused, repressed or difficult to communicate. The “beautiful fiction” of The Connor Brothers is a conscious, ironic and melancholic construction, capable of saying something authentic precisely through artifice.
Irony is one of the central elements of their practice, but it never takes the form of simple cynicism. In the work of The Connor Brothers, humour often emerges as a form of survival, a way of approaching difficult subjects without turning them into rhetoric. Their personal history, marked by experiences connected to addiction, depression, anxiety and mental health, has contributed to shaping a language capable of speaking about fragility with a rare combination of lucidity, lightness and precision.
The Connor Brothers
Come Sit Next To Me, 2022
Hand-painted wooden vintage book and silkscreen
Unique from an edition of 10 works worldwide
The artists themselves have described how their art also grew out of an open dialogue around these experiences. In a conversation dedicated to mental health, James Golding explained:
“Making art with Mike was born out of having an open and ongoing dialogue about our mental health and addiction issues.”
This biographical dimension should not be read sentimentally, but as one of the keys to understanding their work. The Connor Brothers transform personal experiences, social tensions and collective imagery into phrases and images that operate as brief cultural short circuits. Their works are immediate, but not simplified; accessible, but never harmless.
The relationship between vulnerability and visual language runs through many of their series. Images built from vintage covers, female figures, animals, dinosaurs, slogans and pop references are not aimed at nostalgia as decoration. Rather, they use the past as a visual archive through which to speak about the present. The retro aesthetic becomes a familiar surface through which to address deeply contemporary feelings: insecurity, identity, isolation and the difficulty of being adults in a world shaped by continuous forms of pressure.
Social engagement also plays an important role in their practice. Over the years, The Connor Brothers have collaborated with several charitable organizations, supporting causes related to mental health, suicide prevention, healthcare and young people affected by cancer. They have worked, among others, with CALM, NHS Covid-19 Appeal, The Big Issue and Teenage Cancer Trust.
Speaking about these initiatives, the artists have emphasized how working with socially engaged organizations also provides a way to counterbalance some of the self-referential dynamics of the art system:
“Being able to work with people who are really engaged in social causes helps balance that feeling out.”
This aspect helps explain why their work has found such broad resonance. The Connor Brothers do not create works closed within the language of art for art’s sake, but images capable of circulating across different contexts, from collecting to auctions, from charitable collaborations to exhibition spaces, while maintaining a strong and unmistakable identity.
Their practice occupies a territory in which conceptual art, popular culture, appropriation, editorial graphics and social critique coexist without becoming heavy-handed. The result is a body of work that speaks to the contemporary collector precisely because it is able to hold together immediacy and depth. The phrase catches the eye, the image seduces, but the meaning remains open, often more ambiguous than it first appears.
The Connor Brothers
Every Saint, 2025
Hand-painted vintage book and silkscreen
Unique from an edition of 20 works worldwide
This ambiguity is one of the most interesting aspects of their research. The works of The Connor Brothers often seem to formulate certainties, yet they actually open up questions. Their phrases take the form of slogans, but undermine their own authority. Their images appear to belong to a shared visual imagination, but are relocated into a new context, where meaning becomes less stable.
In this space - between what is true, what is invented and what we choose to believe - lies the force of their art. Sometimes, a fiction constructed with intelligence can reveal more than a truth stated without imagination.