The Big Picture
The Haas Brothers — twins Nikolai and Simon, Austin kids turned LA makers of glossy, mischievous sculpture and furniture — are bringing a touring retrospective back home. Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley opens at The Blanton on September 27 and stays through mid‑January, gathering more than 15 years of work that reads equal parts toy catalog and fever dream: automotive paint, 3D‑printed nylon, hand‑blown glass and a finish that makes even a chair look like it wants to wink at you. The show is billed as a literal homecoming — the same city where they built forts in Pease Park and went to Eeyore’s Birthday — and as a tidy career checkpoint for artists who now move between high craft and Hollywood‑adjacent visibility.
This isn’t a small local show folded into a university hallway; it’s a moment meant to let Austinites trace the arc from neighborhood weirdness to an international practice that has drawn celebrity attention. The Blanton is giving that arc a stage in the city that once taught them to make trouble.
What Changed
Across the last decade and a half the brothers’ work shifted from hands‑on local maker projects to large, hybrid objects produced with specialized fabrication and global partners. The retrospective includes pieces as recent as The Strawberry Tree (2024), a Seuss‑leaning, tree‑like work made with hand‑blown glass from a Milanese studio — a concrete sign that their process now routinely involves international collaboration and materials beyond a neighborhood studio. Where earlier output might have been read as craft or furniture, their pieces now sit deliberately between sculpture and design, wrapped in a theatrical surface that flirts with commercial gloss.
Simon’s line that the show is “a homecoming” and “means we’ve made it” crystallizes the personal side of that shift: the brothers have translated an Austin eccentricity into a platform that plays on global stages, and now they’re returning the package to where the story started.
What's Next
The immediate, dated step is straightforward: Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley opens September 27 at The Blanton and runs through mid‑January. The published announcement did not include ticket or hours details; readers are directed to check Austin Monthly's report or The Blanton directly before planning a visit. Beyond the Austin run the piece frames the exhibition as part of an ongoing tour, but the source supplies no further city-by-city dates.
If you grew up here and ever made a weird thing in a backyard fort, this is the show that politely asks: remember that impulse? It packed it into lacquer and sent it on a plane, and now it’s back on your block to be judged like a distant relative who got famous for making odd lamps.