The Haas Brothers: Cuteness as a Trojan Horse, and an Irreverent Austin Homecoming at the Blanton

How well do you know the Haas Brothers? Niki and Simon. I caught their exhibition Snails in Comparison at Lora Reynolds Gallery back in the spring of 2023. I remember the press release leaned heavily into big, quiet themes—pandemic isolation, family, mortality, the weight of human fragility captured in carved marble and blown glass following the birth of Niki’s son, Fox, and the long separation of lockdown. Walking through the gallery’s space on West 6th Street, I found the work genuinely funny. I admired the technical flex of pairing blown glass bodies with shells hand-carved in stone. But I walked out realizing I hadn’t quite grasped what those objects were trying to do to me as a viewer. I’ll get another shot at it this fall. Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley at the Blanton Museum of Art runs Sept. 27 -Jan. 2027 in Austin.

What Niki and Simon Haas are actually after is releasing viewers from shame—specifically, the shame tied up in sexuality, gender, and the messy bodily functions we’re conditioned to suppress. The sex isn’t there to shock. It’s a calculated move to break your posture before the destabilization even starts. And beneath all that visual noise sits intense material research and mathematical precision—a dynamic that pairs Simon’s penchant for analytical, rule-based systemization with Niki’s instinct for unfiltered playfulness. That balance was sparked early in their career when a broken Gio Ponti bed frame forced them to transition from L.A. prop fabricators to furniture designers—a “disaster as opportunity” moment that birthed their signature anthropomorphic feet. It still anchors their practice today, extending even into their newest Accretions paintings, where algorithmic rules for squeezing bottles of paint build up three-dimensional surfaces, pushing their work squarely out of decorative design and into conceptual painting. That was my blind spot in 2023.

As their mid-career survey moves to Austin, previous critical responses have predictably split. Design press flattens the show into a “weird, wonderful world” of quirky forms while stepping around the candy-colored gastropods sprouting explicit genitalia. Establishment critics write off the lewd forms and punning titles as tiresomely juvenile. Both miss the point entirely. One sanitizes the work into safe luxury decor; the other dismisses it as an expensive prank. In 2023, I fell for a variation of that same trap.

The survey’s title names the apparatus outright. In robotics, the “uncanny valley” marks that eerie threshold where an artificial figure becomes almost—but not quite—human, triggering revulsion instead of connection. Simon Haas points to the escape: “When a robot is humanoid with an extra dose of cuteness, empathy for the object skyrockets.” Blanton curator Carter Foster frames it similarly as a deliberate destabilization: “To me, it’s the line between the familiar and the unfamiliar—you think it’s one thing, and then it’s something else.” Cuteness—and their punning titles like Christofur Walken or Hairy J. Blige—isn’t a style choice. It’s a Trojan horse. It disarms your defenses just enough for their biomorphic critters and exposed anatomical forms to do their work.

The show anchors itself in over 80 works across fifteen years, many emerging from complex collaborations with artisan collectives in South Africa and California. Rather than imposing top-down design, Simon created the Bead Book, an algorithmic syntax that acts as a shared language across continents. The resulting flora follows relentless natural math: Fibonacci sequences dictate flower heads, double-scale multipliers shape leaves. As Foster notes, that extreme discipline is what elevates the work beyond standard pop irony: “They’re deadly serious in terms of the way they execute things. There’s a true virtuosity with materials that’s kind of astonishing… The humor almost becomes like a foil to that.” Remove that mathematical control, and the work collapses into kitsch.

Laura Mott, the show’s organizing curator and an Austin native herself, sees the hometown framing as anything but incidental. It’s “completely normal,” she says, for an institution taking on a touring show to make it ‘slightly their own’—the checklist of works doesn’t change, but the frame does. Cranbrook’s own materials lean academic, by her account, because she’s the scholar who wrote the accompanying catalog; the Museum of Arts and Design’s lean toward craft and design, in keeping with its mission. Blanton’s lean toward hometown-hero territory is no less deliberate.

For Central Texas, Uncanny Valley arrives as a 15-year homecoming—one shaped not just by the artists, but by Mott as well. Long before their work reached the Met or Hollywood’s elite, the twins spent formative years in 1990s Austin—learning stone carving from their father and creative storytelling from their TV-writer mother. It was a city where, in 1995, I grabbed a couple slices at Conan’s, rounded the corner to Toy Joy for some patchouli incense, then caught a burgeoning Wilco at Antone’s across the street—a texture that shaped their ribald worldview and mine. Now the Blanton, a university museum in Texas defined by civic decorum, presents work fundamentally built on an anti-decorum posture.

Mott ties that friction to something more specific than nostalgia. Growing up in Texas means growing up around taxidermy as ordinary decor— “you go a few doors down to a restaurant,” she says, “and you’re going to see something like taxidermy.” That familiarity, in her account, was built into the Beasts from the start: the gap between a stuffed animal you’d cuddle and a mounted one you’d flinch from is exactly the space the creatures occupy. A New York or Michigan audience needs that distinction introduced to them. An Austin one already lives inside it.

This creates a classic anthropological collision: placing what Mary Douglas called “matter out of place” inside an institution designed to contain it. When asked about navigating that tension with works like the explicitly titled King Dong, Foster pointed to spatial choreography rather than censorship: “We’re sensitive to our audiences… We’re not going to hide anything, but we think about placement—putting it in a back corner with a wall in front of it so people can navigate it on their own terms.” A preview’s job is to pose questions rather than answer them before the doors open, so the critical test remains: Can the museum framework hold their subversion, or will the gallery environment domesticate it into something comfortable for art patrons?

When the doors open in September, the work will demand something of you that most museum experiences don’t: a willingness to sit with discomfort long enough to understand what it’s trying to dismantle. The craft pulls you in. The cuteness builds empathy. Before you notice what’s happening, your assumptions about taste, decorum, and shame have been quietly taken apart.

I missed this in 2023. I won’t miss it this time.

—JON HOPSON