SIMON HAAS

Working with graphite on clayboard—a notably smooth, hard, and resistant surface—Haas renders imagery with quiet, meticulous clarity. His subjects dwell in the everyday, drawing from queer visual culture and personal experience. The drawings embrace a directness that heightens their sensitivity to touch, texture, and observation. Haas’s close attention equalizes his subjects in a diaristic mode moving fluidly between overgrown shady landscapes or waves breaking on a shoreline and a detailed examination of a muscular shoulder with exacting precision. These personal investigations are as equally rigorous, conceptual, and formal to his collaborative sculptures and furniture that draw on themes of nature, fantasy, and humor.

Describing his contribution to his collaborative work, Simon says, “I’m on the end of obsessive material research and contextualizing our ideas. I also play the role of editor. I’m a studious nerd and [my brother’s] an out-there sculptor.” Masterful at the close up, Simon’s editing eye becomes apparent through his solo painting and drawings. His imagery develops like a novel into a richly detailed world, picture by picture, shrub by shrub, wave by wave.

Simon Haas (b. 1984, Santa Monica, CA) is one half of the artist duo The Haas Brothers. Together the brothers are known for exuberant sculptural and installation works that blur the boundaries between art and design through furniture. Now based in Los Angeles, Simon and his twin grew up in Austin, TX surrounded by a family of artists and creatives; their mother was a screenwriter and opera singer, their father a painter and stonemason, their brother an actor. Following a childhood of creative collaboration, the twins found themselves on opposite coasts—Simon studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design.

The Haas Brothers have shown their work widely in the United States and abroad. Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley, their first major mid-career survey, debuted at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI in 2025, and will travel to the Museum of Arts & Design, New York, NY, the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, and the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami FL; the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, and featured in group exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO; the Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, VT; Sculpture Milwaukee, WI; the Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL; the KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY. In 2016, they were included in the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY, and in 2019, they were recipients of the YoungArts Foundation Arison Award. Works by The Haas Brothers are held in major public collections including the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the RISD Museum, Providence, RI. Haas lives and work in Los Angeles, CA.