Nikolai and Simon Haas learned stone carving from their father, and now the twin brothers are bringing their strange, biomorphic sculptures back to the city that shaped them. Their touring exhibition, Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley, opens to the general public on September 27 at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, running through January 17, 2027.
The show marks what the Blanton Museum of Art describes as the Haas Brothers' first major museum exhibition in Austin, a homecoming for artists who lived in the city from ages 3 to 19 before relocating to Los Angeles. As reported by KEYE, the brothers founded their collaborative studio in 2010, building a body of work that crosses art, craft, design, and technology through colorful creatures and plant-like sculptures. Nikolai Haas told the station that Austin's art scene in the 1990s engaged people and made them feel happy and excited, and that the city gave young artists room to experiment without the pressures found in larger art centers.
According to the same account, Nikolai Haas said Austin left space for artists to create simply because they loved doing it. That ethos traces back to the brothers' father, Berthold Haas, from whom Nikolai and Simon learned stone carving, per Arts and Culture Texas Magazine. The brothers were raised by an opera singer and screenwriter mother alongside their stone-sculptor father.
Moontowers, Treaty Oak, and the Uncanny Valley Concept
The exhibition's title nods to the robotics and psychology concept of the uncanny valley, where objects that closely mimic living beings provoke an eerie unease, an idea the brothers counter by folding cuteness, humor, and bizarre flourishes into their creatures, as detailed by Design Milk. Simon Haas has pointed to that tension as a unifying thread running through fifteen years of the studio's output. The show spans roughly that same 15-year stretch of the brothers' career and features more than 80 artworks made from bronze, porcelain, carved wood, blown glass, antique Venetian glass beads, automotive paint, and 3D-printed nylon.
Several of those pieces draw directly on landmarks the brothers passed as kids growing up in Austin. The brothers drew on the Treaty Oak, the city's historic street moontowers, and local business signage in creating the biomorphic forms on display. Specific works visitors can see include Cyberzoid 3, a 2023 piece built from 3D-printed nylon, automotive paint, and glow-in-the-dark blown glass, and Centripeter Shire, a 2019 sculpture constructed from glass beads, wire, and mixed fiber stuffing. Modern Luxury reports that the exhibition runs from September 26 to January 17.
A National Tour With Deep Austin Roots
Uncanny Valley is a nationally touring show that debuted at Cranbrook Art Museum in Michigan before moving to New York's Museum of Arts and Design, and the Blanton stop carries its own hometown-curator twist. The traveling exhibition was organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Laura Mott, an Austin native, per the Blanton Museum of Art. The exhibition features more than 80 works, according to the museum, and the tour is set to conclude at The Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, from July 2027 to January 2028.
The tour is accompanied by a 256-page monograph co-published by Cranbrook Art Museum and Monacelli Press, described by Cranbrook Art Museum as the most comprehensive catalog of the Haas Brothers' career to date, with new curatorial insights into their work. It is not the brothers' first Texas showing in recent memory, either: the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas hosted Haas Brothers: Moonlight from May to August 2024, featuring a monumental bronze-and-glass Strawberry Tree sculpture.
Blanton Members Get First Look Before Public Opening
Blanton Museum of Art members received early access to the show from September 23 through September 26, ahead of Sunday's public opening. The brothers' sculptures have already found permanent homes in major U.S. collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the RISD Museum, according to the Marianne Boesky Gallery, a track record that underscores how far the Austin-raised twins have traveled since their father's stone studio.
