The Haas Brothers apply their signature marriage of high and low brow across a diverse array of materials, incorporating their playful approach to artmaking and design in brass, bronze, glass, marble, porcelain, and wool. Having begun their career as furniture designers, their work often marries the functional and the fantastical—stools, mirrors, chairs, street lamps, and side tables with furry bodies or biomorphic brass feet and legs. The Haas Brothers’s sculptural works take the form of fantastical beasts, giant mushrooms, and otherworldly aliens. Often finished with intricate beading, animal fur, and highly technical resins, the artists’ cast of fanciful characters have humorous names (often, again, puns on notable people) and endearing personalities.
With their creations—across media, scale, and form—the Haas Brothers strive for a resounding emotional resonance. Employing shock, humor, and titillation, the Haas Brothers build rooms filled with phalluses and suggestive orifices, adorn their furniture with bronze testicles, place lightbulbs in disembodied hands, and produce furry, headless beasts. Subverting the rigid norms that control imagination, the Haas Brothers’s work liberates its viewers to a land of fantasy, to a world beyond constraints, to a place of childhood innocence. “I think we are honing our ability to create fantasy,” Nikolai says. “It’s definitely supposed to take you back to childhood, and it’s meant to free you from preconceived stereotypes or rules in how you interact with the world and yourself.”
The Haas Brothers have shown their work widely in the United States and abroad. An exhibition of their work is forthcoming at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; the Katonah Museum of Art; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami; and the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art. The Haas Brothers’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
[excerpted from Marianne Boesky Gallery website: www.marianneboeskygallery.com]