For more than 15 years, the Haas Brothers have created a body of work that is not easily categorized. Their surreal creatures, anthropomorphic furniture and intricate beaded sculptures occupy a space somewhere between collectible design, contemporary art and playful experimentation. This spring, this evolving practice is taking center stage Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valleythe duo’s largest museum exhibition to date, on view in New York Museum of Arts and Design.
The exhibition traces the artistic collaboration of twin brothers Nikolai and Simon Haas through 85 works created between 2014 and 2025, including many new works. Edited by Laura Mott of Cranbrook Museum of Art in Detroit, Uncanny Valley includes sculpture, ceramics, painting, furniture and process studies.
Photo: Jenna Bascom. courtesy of MAD.
After establishing their Los Angeles studio in 2010, the Haas Brothers have become known for biomorphic forms that feel both whimsical and rigorously constructed. The MAD exhibition reveals the systems beneath this game through projects such as Accretion ceramic series, inspired by coral growth, and intricate botanical beaded sculptures made with thousands of antique Venetian glass beads. Digital processes are displayed through algorithmically generated landscapes and self-generated sculptural forms, expanding the studio’s ongoing dialogue between craft and technology.
Photo: Jenna Bascom. courtesy of MAD.
The title of the exhibition borrows from the eponymous psychological concept, which Simon Haas sees as a through-line in their work.
“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 turns to revulsion. The solution to that is to add sweetness,” says Simon. “Looking at our 15-year career since a
from the point of view of the birds, the ‘uncanny valley’ came into focus as a key theme’.
Photo: Jenna Bascom. courtesy of MAD.
Rather than choosing between art and design, beauty and humor, or function and fantasy, the exhibition embraces these tensions, inviting visitors into a world where each category becomes a little harder to define.
Photo: Jenna Bascom. courtesy of MAD.
Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley will be on display at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York until August 16, 2026, before traveling to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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