Leo & Neil Collection

Monday 12 January 2026

TLDR

• 30 hand-painted works following two men through the slow negotiations of a shared life: what they quietly become in order to stay together

• As love succeeds, the collection traces the versions of self quietly retired, the identities performed, the ones grieved in private

• The first collection in the 2026 STORIES series.

Leo & Neil is the first collection in the 2026 STORIES series: 30 hand-painted works following two men through the slow negotiations of a shared life. Each piece is drawn and painted by hand in gouache on A5 cotton rag, then digitised and minted individually. The scale is intimate. The subject is not.

Every relationship has an unspoken contract. Give this up, soften that edge, become easier to love. Leo & Neil are not exceptional in this: they are familiar, two people reshaping themselves to fit the space the other needs. What makes their story particular is the layering of negotiation that queer men carry into a relationship. They are not only negotiating with each other. They are negotiating with inherited shame, with the men they were told to become, with a version of themselves that had to be set aside long before they ever met. This collection looks closely at what two people quietly become in order to stay together.

This is not a collection about love failing. Love succeeds here. The 30 works trace what that means: the versions of self quietly retired, the identities performed, the ones grieved in private. Leo and Neil are people navigating a specific life, and that specificity is where the truth lives.

Two works sit at the heart of the collection for me. 'Before', No. 24, is the moment the contract becomes visible: Leo and Neil look at old photos together, agree they looked so different, and neither mentions how their eyes held more light before. 'Dangerous Sunset', No. 30, is what follows: the two of them on the porch, wondering what they lost becoming ‘us’, neither asking. Some questions feel too dangerous.

Leo & Neil launched the STORIES series and sits in direct conversation with the third collection, Emily & Sarah: both ask what belonging inside a relationship costs, through different lives, different pressures, different erasures.

30 pieces. Minted on objkt.com.

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STORIES: Leo & Neil is part of an ongoing 2026 STORIES series exploring intimate human experience through compressed narrative and hand-painted portraiture.