DALLAS, Texas (January 23, 2024) - The Nasher Sculpture Center announces Moonlight, an exhibition by Austin-native, Los Angeles-based artists Nikolai and Simon Haas, curated by Brooke Hodge. Their other-worldly sculptures will be installed in the museum and garden and outside on Flora Street, greeting museum visitors and passersby alike from May 11 to August 25, 2024, conjuring the magic of moonlight through the summer months.
The Haas Brothers, fraternal twins who launched a collaborative practice in 2010, create playful environments populated with fantastical flora and fauna. Imbued with curiosity, humor, and passion for nature, their furniture, objects, and, most recently, large-scale sculptural installations awaken our imaginations and transport us to another fertile, fanciful, and futuristic world.
Moonlight is presented across three spaces inside and outside the Nasher Sculpture Center, with whimsical and powerful installations that highlight the artists’ distinctive fusion of art, design, and technology. In front of the museum, two Moon Towers—inspired by the iconic streetlamps the brothers remember from their childhood in Austin, Texas—greet visitors from the sidewalk. The tall, glowing sculptures function as streetlamps, recalling both the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí’s organic architecture and the French designer Hector Guimard’s sinuous art nouveau forms.
The Moon Towers create a visual connection to a majestic cast-bronze tree in the Nasher’s Public Gallery, visible inside and from the street-facing window. With a cast-bronze patinated trunk and hand-beaded leaves and limbs laden with illuminated blown glass strawberries, The Strawberry Tree (2023) evokes a moonlit garden.
In the sculpture garden, an eight-foot-tall Emergent Zoid from one of the artists’ newest bodies of work will join sculptures from the Nasher’s permanent collection. The Emergent Zoids are a series of curvaceous sculptures made through an ingenious combination of computation and craft. Using 3D computer graphics software, the Haas Brothers created simulated shapes reminiscent of one of their favorite childhood toys, the Wooden Wiggly Snake, and choreographed their movements digitally. The brothers call the shapes Zoids, in homage to Dr. Zoidberg, a central character in Matt Groening’s animated television series “Futurama.” Computer simulations will be shown in the Entrance Gallery, showing the biomorphic shapes writhe, wriggle, undulate, and intertwine, in infinite permutations of the initial form.
“It is a tremendous pleasure for the Nasher Sculpture Center to welcome the work of the Haas Brothers,” says director Jeremy Strick. “Their visionary objects offer an imaginative and delightful break from everyday reality, creating an atmosphere that is, above all else, enchanting. That most of the works in the exhibition will be accessible to casual passersby as well as to those who enter the museum befits the spirit of the sculptures and their makers, deepening their surprise and joyful wonderment. ”
The Nasher Sculpture Center's 2024 exhibitions are made possible by leading support from Frost Bank.
Haas Brothers: Moonlight is made possible by leading support from Melanie and Alvaro Leal. Generous support is provided by Citizens of Humanity, the Dallas Tourism Public Improvement District (DTPID), Jennifer and John Eagle, Nancy C. and Richard R. Rogers, and Cindy and Howard Rachofksy. Additional support is provided by Jenny and Richard Mullen.
Press contacts
Julie Debski
Sutton Communications
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Adrienne Lichliter-Hines
Nasher Sculpture Center
Manager of Communications and International Programs
+1 214.242.5177 (p)
+1 214.802.5297 (c)
About the Artists:
The Haas Brothers, twins Nikolai and Simon (b. 1984) who live and work in Los Angeles, explore aesthetic and formal themes related to nature, science fiction, sexuality, psychedelia, and color theory across a range of materials. Since launching their collaborative practice in 2010 with functional furniture and ceramics, they have become nimble cross-pollinators in creative disciplines including fashion, film, and music, and have expanded their practice into fine art, architecture, and the digital space. Their evocative and provocative work continues to challenge the slippery divide between art and design.
The Haas Brothers have had numerous solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including those at Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, TX (2017 and 2016); Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago (2017); and Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich (2013). Their work was included in the 2016 Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, which traveled to San Jose Museum of Art. Work by The Haas Brothers may be found in the permanent collections of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Cooper Hewitt; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. They are represented by Marianne Boesky and their first exhibition with the gallery, Stonely Planet, opened in the summer of 2018 at Boesky West in Aspen. Their first solo museum show, Ferngully, was at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami in December 2018.
The Haas Brothers received the Arison Award from the YoungArts Foundation in 2019 and their work was recently featured in solo exhibitions at the Savannah College of Art and Design (2021) and the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY (2022). In 2025 the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI, will present a mid-career survey exhibition of their work.
About the Curator:
Brooke Hodge is an independent curator and writer based in Palm Springs, California. She served as Director of Architecture and Design at Palm Springs Art Museum from 2016-2020. Prior to joining PSAM, Hodge was Deputy Director at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City and from 2010-July 2014 she was Director of Exhibitions Management and Publications at the Hammer Museum. She was Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles from 2001-2009, where she organized major exhibitions on the work of architect Frank Gehry and car designer J Mays, as well as Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture, a groundbreaking thematic exhibition that examined the relationship between contemporary fashion and architecture.
Her recent exhibitions include Disturbances in the Field: Art in the High Desert from Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West to High Desert Test Sites at Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, (2021/2022) and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Community, Activism, and Design at Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT (opening February 2024). In 2014, Hodge guest-curated Provocations: the Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio for the Nasher.