For more than 15 years, the Haas Brothers have built a body of work that isn’t easily categorized. Their surreal creatures, anthropomorphic furniture, and intricately beaded sculptures occupy a space somewhere between collectible design, contemporary art, and playful experimentation. This spring, that evolving practice takes center stage in Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley, the duo’s largest museum exhibition to date, on view at New York City’s Museum of Arts and Design.
The exhibition traces the artistic partnership of twin brothers Nikolai and Simon Haas through 85 works created between 2014 and 2025, including several new pieces. Curated by Laura Mott of Cranbrook Art Museum in Detroit, Uncanny Valley includes sculpture, ceramics, painting, furniture, and process studies.
Photography by Jenna Bascom; courtesy of MAD.
After founding their LA-based studio in 2010, the Haas Brothers have become known for biomorphic forms that feel simultaneously whimsical and rigorously constructed. The MAD exhibition reveals the systems beneath that playfulness through works like the Accretion ceramic series, inspired by coral growth, and intricately beaded botanical sculptures made with thousands of antique Venetian glass beads. Digital processes appear through algorithmically generated landscapes and self-generating sculptural forms, which expand the studio’s ongoing dialogue between craft and technology.
Photography by Jenna Bascom; courtesy of MAD.
The exhibition’s title borrows from the psychological concept of the same name, which Simon Haas sees as a throughline 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 switches to revulsion. The solution for this is to add cuteness,” Simon says. “Looking at our 15-year career from a
bird’s eye view, the ‘uncanny valley’ came into focus as a core theme.”
Photography by Jenna Bascom; courtesy of MAD.
Rather than choosing between art and design, beauty and humor, or function and fantasy, the exhibition embraces those tensions, inviting visitors into a world where each category becomes a little harder to define.
Photography by Jenna Bascom; courtesy of MAD.
Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley will be on view at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York through Aug. 16, 2026, before traveling to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Editorial Transparency: This article was developed with the assistance of AI tools, which may have been used for research, outlining, editing, or copy refinement. Reporting, fact-checking, and editorial decisions were made by the Design Milk editorial team.
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