Artists Mike Snelle and James Golding burst onto the scene in 2012 under the pseudonym, the Connor Brothers. Initially capturing the imagination of the art world through their fictitious backstory as two innocent twins who escaped a Californian cult, they soon received critical acclaim for their paintings and screenprints, which offer a sardonic twist on the visual conventions of pulp fiction. The images are often classic Mills & Boon style tableaux, set pieces featuring beautiful, glamorous, stylised women. These are accompanied by a punchline or phrase, often appropriated from the world’s greatest poets, cynics and wits, and then transformed by clever wordplay into an altogether different meaning. The Connor Brothers work falls into a wider contemporary art trend that incorporates the written word into artworks, a compositional form whose history extends back to Picasso’s Cubist collage, through the pioneering post-war work of Mel Bochner, Robert Indiana and Ed Ruscha to contemporary artists today, such as the street-art compositions of Mr Brainwash. Although the Connor Brothers have produced original paintings, the vast majority of their work comes in limited editions, either silkscreen prints or hand-painted and embellished prints. This means that their works on the primary market are often at relatively affordable price points, in spite of the size of their following… though new releases often sell out within days! The Connor Brothers have an established secondary market in spite of their relatively recent conception, with their auction record standing in excess of £40,000 (Phillips London, 15 December 2020 and Sotheby’s London 2021). Moreover, their market has shown significant growth with the average value of the Connor Brothers’ limited editions at auction having increased 176% since 2015.
