The Connor Brothers are British artists Mike Snelle and James Golding — though for the first eighteen months of their public career, nobody knew that. They presented themselves as innocent twins who had emerged traumatised from a Californian cult and were struggling to make sense of the world through their art. The fiction was so convincing, and so perfectly calibrated to the art world's appetite for outsider narratives, that it took hold completely. When they eventually broke cover, the reaction was one of understanding and even amusement. The myth had done its work.
The story is not merely biographical colour. It is the subject of the work itself. The Connor Brothers' entire practice is an investigation of the relationship between truth and fiction, between appearance and reality, between what we see and what we want to see. "It is the paradox of art that artifice is often the best way to depict reality," Mike Snelle has said, "fiction the best way to challenge conventional ideas of what we think of as 'the truth'. Who knows the truth of anything?" In the current climate of fake news, post-truth politics, and social media's systematic confusion of the real and the performed, this has proved to be the most timely of preoccupations.
Their best-known works combine pulp fiction cover art imagery with words drawn from the world's greatest poets, cynics, and wits — satirical juxtapositions of cliché and brilliance that invite us to examine our assumptions about language, image, and the stories we tell ourselves. Fake It Til You Make It, Celebrity is a Mask, We Must Be Careful: each title operates simultaneously as joke, provocation, and observation about the culture in which it appears.
Their social engagement is serious and sustained. After working for several years in the Calais refugee camp known as The Jungle, they launched the Refuchic billboard campaign. They created a refugee-themed show at Banksy's Dismaland and continue to work with mental health charity CALM. Their work is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Penguin Collection, and the Omar Koch and Niarchos Collections. At Sotheby's Contemporary Art Online Auction in May 2021, The Bestest and Most Expensivist Painting in the History of Art sold for over £44,000 — 300% above estimate.
Sell-out shows in LA, New York, Sydney, Dubai, London, Hong Kong, and Berlin. Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.
