£1,800.00
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‘These fantastical Horses look like My Little Ponies on Mars'
Sam Anderson, The New York Times Magazine.
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As seen in The New York Times Magazine, The Observer, The Guardian, Financial Times, ID, AnOther, Creative Review, La Repubblica... amongst others
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Gareth McConnell’s psychedelic Icelandic horse photographs crack open the traditional image of the horse—majestic, controlled, subservient—and rewire it into something more cosmic, more electric. Bathed in hallucinatory hues, his horses seem to flicker between worlds, existing somewhere between dream and hyper-reality, between the ancient and the digital age. Their glowing manes and spectral eyes pulse with a strange sentience, as if they’ve galloped straight out of a vision or a fever dream.
In art history, the horse is a shifting symbol: from the noble war steeds of Renaissance paintings to the color-charged emotional intensity of Franz Marc’s Blue Horse. Marc, a founding member of the Der Blaue Reiter group, believed that color could transcend its visual properties to communicate deeper emotional and spiritual truths. In his color theory, Marc assigned distinct emotional qualities to different colors—blue representing the spiritual and the divine, yellow the playful and the joyful, and red symbolizing the violent and the earthly. This use of color in Marc’s work provides an important parallel to McConnell’s psychedelic horses, where bright, neon hues create a sense of hyperreality, transforming the horses from earthly creatures into symbolic vessels of chaos and freedom.
Edwin Muir’s poem The Horses reimagines them as eerie, almost supernatural survivors of an apocalyptic silence—ancient forces returning to a world that has destroyed itself. McConnell’s horses echo this eerie return, vibrating with the kind of strange, prophetic energy that suggests they know something we don’t.
Then there’s the myth of Nietzsche’s Turin horse, as told by Milan Kundera—a moment of tragic poetry in which the philosopher, upon witnessing a beaten carriage horse, collapses in grief, embracing the animal before descending into madness. It’s a fable of human fragility, of the unbearable weight of witnessing suffering. McConnell himself has said he sees horses as “a symbol of chaos, freedom, and something unknowable and unpredictable at the edge of consciousness.” His images bring that vision to life, transforming these creatures into luminous, almost digital entities. They aren’t just captured; they seem to stare back, dissolving the boundary between human and animal, dream and waking, past and future.
The setting of Iceland adds yet another layer of mysticism and isolation to McConnell’s horses. The raw, volcanic landscape of the island, with its otherworldly terrain and stark beauty, creates an almost spiritual backdrop that seems to charge these creatures with an energy that is both ancient and futuristic. Iceland’s geographic remoteness has long been a place of myth and legend, and in some ways, McConnell’s horses are part of that narrative—a link between the primal forces of nature and the unknown.
This connection to the mystical is further amplified by the influence of Bill Drummond’s theory of interstellar ley lines—those invisible currents of energy that supposedly run through the Earth’s surface, linking sacred sites and cosmic forces. Drummond, in his exploration of these lines, suggests that certain places on Earth, like Iceland, resonate with a unique energy that can influence both physical and spiritual realms. McConnell’s horses seem to exist in that space where ley lines intersect, embodying the energy of the land itself—chaotic, mysterious, and full of potential. His horses are more than just animals; they are symbols of a greater cosmic order, a connection between the earth, the stars, and the human consciousness.
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'When Gareth McConnell was commissioned to photograph the wild horses of Iceland by the New York Times magazine last summer, there was a sense of apocalypse in the air. The news was dominated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and energy shortages and the climate emergency. McConnell didn’t know Iceland, or its singular horses, but he took with him, he says, a couple of personal reference points for the assignment.
One was Edwin Muir’s haunting poem The Horses, which begins: “Barely a twelvemonth after / The seven days war that put the world to sleep, / Late in the evening the strange horses came.” The other was pop shaman Bill Drummond’s belief that an interstellar ley line comes to Earth in the rifts and crags of Iceland (before later spiralling back underground outside the Cavern Club in Liverpool). McConnell was, at the very least, he told me last week, determined not to do a National Geographic set of pictures. The time and place seemed to demand something stranger, more unnatural.
Out in the “middle of nowhere” – or more precisely, Skeiðvellir in Iceland’s Suðurland region, about 50 miles east of Reykjavík – that sense of otherworldliness was only exaggerated. McConnell was struck by a feeling that the horses, “co-creators of our world up until the Industrial Revolution”, had been somehow cast adrift. It was as if, he says, as in Muir’s poem, an unnameable disaster had happened and the horses were part of the landscape of survival. The psychedelic effects of the pictures he took were mostly produced by playing around with torches and gels – “redundant technology”. This picture is included in a book he has made of the series. He toyed with the idea of calling the volume The Pink, Yellow and Blue Riders, but in the end, he borrowed Muir’s simpler title, The Horses – symbols, as the poet wrote, of “that long-lost archaic companionship”.'
Tim Adams, The Observer
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'Leaning towards the surreal and unexpected have always been at the heart of McConnell’s practice, which self-consciously refers to the history of the medium. The horse, in particular, is an important symbol in the history of art, evoking the equestrian portraits of George Stubbs, to Eadweard Muybridge’s late 19th-century stills-in-motion. “The horse is a poignant symbol,” McConnell adds. “Historically, they represented civilisation, power and status … but in this context we might think of the impending environmental catastrophe – the end of civilisation.”'
Lydia Figes, AnOther
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'McConnell has employed bold craft skills to make this series, which, by excluding models – humans – redistributes some species power. (McConnell has strong themes of misfit, misplaced, and outsider groups in his work.) He shines improbably glorious, cosmic lights on the horses, using colours like those associated with transformative mood experiences such as music and dance, drug use, or the bright sunlight that falls through the stained-glass window of cathedrals.
McConnell addresses ideas of separation caused, mostly, by human intervention. On occasion a horse is seen in what looks an understated indoor studio context, standing on stock floor coverings and before backdrops, unsaddled, and unbridled. The visual analogy with a beautiful human is striking – lights and shadows and colours are arranged to exquisite perfection, as they would be for a model in a sumptuous advertisement, the object of which is to persuade ownership.
With this series McConnell has launched the equivalent of a trillion-dollar campaign for extreme luxury goods, whose intention is not ownership, but to rewild. lt is an irony, of course, and part of our disgrace, that active human intervention for re-wilding is so necessary. Although McConnell’s campaign originates in the trans-hyphenating mythologies of Pegasus, unicorns, and centaurs, his target is prioritising the primary animal. In this way he gives value to what he says is a more ‘spiritual, expressive sphere,’ returning to horses their mystical absoluteness.'
Neal Brown
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'There is also a long tradition of horses being depicted in art, from neolithic cave paintings to Muybridge and the birth of cinema. Up until the industrial revolution, horses were vital to creating, and maintaining, society - helping us work the land and transport goods. It seems emblematic and timely to publish a book at this time, as we again enter an age of rapid change with technologies, such as AI, ushering in as yet unknown shifts in our society, art, and industry.'
Gareth McConnell, Coeval
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'I like the intervention of it. That it's very clearly a staged event. And it highlights the enchantment of the ordinary, the things we encounter daily but rarely appreciate. With my work, I'm trying to tune in to some kind of cosmic wonderment that's inherent in our surroundings, but that we pass by everyday and overlook.'
Gareth McConnell, EuroNews
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'I saw this as an opportunity to commune with our most ancient companion, one of the original subjects in art,” McConnell says. To him, the image of the horse symbolises technological progress while reminding us of “humankind’s urgent responsibility to repair its lost bond with nature.'
Gareth McConnell, Creative Review