Haas Brothers in New York
On view at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York from April 11 through August 2026 will be “Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley,” the first major touring exhibition devoted to the collaborative work of twin brothers Nikolai and Simon Haas (b. 1984, Santa Monica, CA; raised in Austin, TX).
“Uncanny Valley” at the Museum of Arts and Design, curated by Laura Mott of Cranbrook Art Museum, will feature artwork created between 2014 and 2025, including several new and never-exhibited pieces. The 85 works on view, ranging in scale from tabletop to towering, will span sculpture, ceramics, painting, and furniture, as well as a process documentation component.
Founded in Los Angeles in 2010, the Haas Brothers studio is known for its surrealist hybrid creatures, fantastical worlds, and material experimentation straddling the worlds of fine art and design. Uncanny Valley aims to reveal how the artists build complex environments and characters through a meticulous yet lighthearted process they refer to as “problem-solving fantasies.” From masterfully crafted ceramic vessels that echo organic growth patterns to computer-generated landscapes inspired by ’90s digital aesthetics, their work invites both technical and conceptual examination that, presented as a 15-year chronology, will engage visitors through the depth and breadth of their distinctive universe.
“Uncanny Valley” will highlight signature series such as Beasts—zoomorphic sculptures full of personality, humor, and cultural commentary—and the process-based Accretion ceramics, which mimic coral-like growth through thousands of delicate porcelain applications. Also featured are Endless Paintings (algorithmically generated landscapes rooted in early computer graphics) and Emergent Sculptures, which explore self-generating forms through digital code.
Prominently featured will be intricately beaded plant sculptures, some featuring hundreds of thousands of antique Venetian glass beads. To create a sculptural replica of a plant, Simon examines the mathematical formulas in the Bead Book (an authoritative glossary of thousands of rulebased bead stitches) to figure out which may be combined in order to create a beaded or knotted version of that object and have it retain the same proportions one sees in the real thing. Hidden beneath the beauty of these flora lies a set of rigid patterns and principles that guide their shapes. Works in the show include a Fibonacci progression in flowers, a double-scale increase in leaves, and off-center axes that produce the natural curvature found in many plant forms. While the works on view are whimsical and other-worldly, they are firmly rooted in intricate systems of mathematics and structure.
In a related body of work, on view at Marianne Boesky in Chelsea in tandem with the MAD exhibition, will be the artists’ monumental The Strawberry Tree (2023): a cast bronze tree adorned with intricate, beaded foliage and glowing, blown-glass strawberries. The artists developed the particular, systematic process for hand-beading The Strawberry Tree foliage in partnership with a group of women in Lost Hills, CA. Incorporating a host of techniques and materials that the artists have honed over the course of their collaboration, The Strawberry Tree is at once whimsical and poignant: strawberries, of course, don’t grow on trees, but perhaps in the fantastical realm of the Haas Brothers, glowing pink strawberries grow from beaded, blue trees.
Embodying the trajectory of the artists’ work in the contemporary art space distinct from design, their newest acrylic-on-canvas series, Accretions, will be represented by two large paintings on view. Inspired by the layered accumulation process found throughout the natural world—in coral, in tree fungus, in cave formations—the artists’ earliest Accretion works consisted of wet clay brushed atop dry clay to achieve gradually mottled surfaces. The new Accretions paintings find the artists operating within a predetermined set of rules that they repeat using squeeze bottles of acrylic paint, building up the surfaces over time to create richly textured three dimensionality.
The exhibition borrows its title from the psychological phenomenon of the same name; explains Simon Haas: “The ‘uncanny valley’ generally refers to robotics, where empathy for a robot increases the more human you make it – up to a point. When the robot becomes too human, empathy switches to revulsion. The solution for this is to add cuteness: when a robot is humanoid with an extra dose of cute, empathy for the object skyrockets. Looking at our 15-year career from a bird’s eye view, the ‘uncanny valley’ came into focus as a core theme.”
An example?
“What’s the difference between cutting one table leg slightly short, and making a table lift its leg as if peeing like a dog?,” asks Simon, referring to a work from the Brothers’ Hex series (this particular work, used for illustrative purposes, is not in the exhibition). “The first aspect, cutting a table leg slightly short, is irritating; losing functionality with nothing gained. But the second part, giving this table an anthropomorphized quality, transcends pure function and becomes intentional, perhaps even funny. There is an active tension between form and function that draws you in; suddenly, as in the ‘uncanny valley’ principle, a design object becomes ‘empathetic.’”
Throughout their practice, the Haas Brothers are known to investigate the divide between art and design with humor, whimsy, and inventive originality. While they are commonly associated with their riotously colorful biomorphic forms; genitalia-adorned furniture; and pun-infused titles, an intellectual, conceptual, and technical rigor grounds their practice. Marrying their respective personalities and strengths— Simon’s penchant for analysis and systemization, and Nikolai’s playfulness, humor, and creativity— the duo has found new ways to balance substance with irreverence in each new body of work. Thus marks a long-term arc that the Brothers look forward to conveying in a fresh way as visitors walk through “Uncanny Valley.”
