Haas Brothers bring Uncanny Valley to the Blanton

If you have not yet wandered over to the Blanton Museum of Art this fall, there is a good reason to make the trip. The museum has opened "Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley," a mid-career survey of the work of Nikolai and Simon Haas, the twin brothers born in 1984 in Santa Monica who are former Austin natives. It is their first major museum exhibition in Austin and their first mid-career retrospective, pulling together selections from fifteen years of their work. The show opened on September 27 and runs through January 17, so there is plenty of time to catch it before the new year.

The Haas Brothers are best known for fantastical sculptures that blend art, design, and technology into colorful, biomorphic forms that look like creatures and plants from another world. They work in a wide range of rich materials — porcelain, bronze, wool, glass beads, fur, and brass plate — and the results are as much about craft as they are about imagination. A lot of the imagery comes straight from Austin itself, with nods to the Treaty Oak, the city's moontowers, and the chicken that sat on top of the original Whole Foods. Carter Foster, the museum's chief curator and deputy director of collections, describes the work as "incredibly well crafted and very imaginative."

The title is not accidental. It points to roboticist Masahiro Mori's 1970 hypothesis about the "uncanny valley," the idea that when a robot becomes too human, empathy can flip to revulsion. Simon Haas explains that adding cuteness is what sends that empathy skyrocketing again, which is exactly what the exhibition leans into. There are more than 80 works on view, anchored by "The Strawberry Tree" (2024), a monumental sculpture made of 500,000 tiny blue beads that will sit in the center of the Blanton for the next three and a half months. Other pieces worth a look include "She's So Ducky" (2018), "Bruce Willis Beyonclé" (2016), "Centripeter Shire" (2019), and "Cyberzoid 3" (2023). A quick heads-up for parents: some of the more fantastical sculptures depict imagined creatures that some viewers may find sensitive or not appropriate for young children.

There is also a calendar of events built around the show. The "B Scene: Monster Ball" lands on Friday, October 30, from 7:00 to 11:00 p.m., with live music from the psychedelic collective Golden Dawn Arkestra, presented by Resound Presents, plus a "Monster Mash" pop-up print exhibition, a scavenger hunt, monster origami, and a costume contest. Admission is $30 for 18 and up, $10 for ages 6 to 17, and free for 5 and under, and it is included for museum members. After that, a public tour in English and Spanish is set for November 1 from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m., and "Blanton Live: The Haas Brothers" runs on November 12 and 15.

For context, the Blanton holds the largest and most comprehensive collection of art in Central Texas, with more than 22,000 objects, and it is part of The University of Texas at Austin. The museum sits at 200 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., so it is an easy stop if you are already downtown.