The Haas Brothers’ Uncanny Valley exhibition at Museum of Arts and Design – Photos by Jenna Bascom, courtesy of MAD Museum.
Design. What happens when two artists refuse to choose between the digital and the handmade, the surreal and the sincere? At MAD – Museum of Arts and Design, that question gets a vivid, sprawling answer — and it’s on view until 16 August.
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Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley brings together around 85 works by Los Angeles-based twin artists Nikolai and Simon Haas, and the result is an exhibition that resists easy description. Think of quirky furry beasts, alien-like vessels, cheeky furniture and psychedelic mushrooms. Together, they map a practice that is as technically rigorous as it is instinctively playful.
Founded in 2010 and largely self-taught, the Haas Brothers have never been easy to categorise — and Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley doesn’t try to. Instead, it traces the evolution of their work through a selection of key series: the iconic Beasts, zoomorphic sculptures loaded with personality and cultural commentary; the Endless Paintings, algorithmically generated landscapes drawing on early computer graphics; and the Emergent Sculptures, which push into territory where digital code begins to feel almost biological.
Collaboration is equally central to the story. The Freaks series — developed with MonkeyBiz, a collective of beadwork artisans in Cape Town, and later expanded through partnerships with women in Lost Hills, California — frames making as something communal and socially engaged rather than solitary. It’s a thread that runs through the exhibition, giving it a warmth that anchors all the strangeness. As the artists themselves have put it: “We believe in making as a collective endeavour.”
Organised by Cranbrook Art Museum, Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley is set to tour across the United States. Strange, generous, and genuinely hard to pin down — much like the work itself.
Photography by Jenna Bascom; courtesy the Museum of Arts and Design.
