As a print curator, I’m pretty experienced at tracking down new work in the medium. Most commonly, when I travel, I’ll see new editions by well-known artists, those boldfaced names that have made printmaking an integral part of their practice; other times a familiar printer or publisher has invited an artist to his or her workshop, thus introducing someone new to printmaking. Either way, there is a relatively prescribed circle of sources where one expects to find such material. What is rare is to find someone making prints totally off the “printmaking grid.” But that’s exactly how I came to know the work of Gert and Uwe Tobias.

Art Basel 2005 was replete with the usual convention center chaos, jet lag, and discreet trading of tidbits about sales and acquisitions. I was making my rounds of the editions section of the fair, my notebook already full of news of prints, when something caught my eye at the booth of Michael Janssen, a Cologne-based gallery: an unusually large woodcut, about 6 by 5 feet, with a luscious color palette ranging from woodsy greens to candy pinks. The work was playful, compositionally bold, and completely lacking in the technical fussiness that can sometimes infect prints. I had never heard of the artist or, rather, artists—a duo named Gert and Uwe Tobias.

Based in Cologne, the pair are not only artistic collaborators but also twin brothers, and my interest in them deepened when I was presented with their 2004 catalogue, Come and See Before the Tourists Will Do—the Mystery of Transylvania. The title refers to their first series of woodcuts, a playful take on an investigation of their own cultural identity. The brothers were born in Brasov, Romania, a former Saxon colony located in Transylvania, a region that looms large in the Western imagination as the home of Count Dracula, the vampire made legend by novelist Bram Stoker and popularized in Hollywood portrayals by Bela Lugosi and, later, Gary Oldman. For the project, the Tobiases conducted an exhaustive survey of B-movie horror films—camp classics like The House on Bare Mountain and My Demon Lover—and used these titles as the jumping-off points for their compositions.

Come and See provides a kind of road map to understanding the Tobiases’ work. Interspersed with the woodcut images are small vignettes, figures created with typographical elements on a typewriter, reproductions of collages juxtaposing fragments from fashion magazines and other sources, travelogue images of wooded shorelines, and old-fashioned maps of Transylvania. The work’s diverse influences range from Hollywood fantasy and pop culture to folklore and Eastern European vernacular arts and crafts. Conscious of not wanting to be labeled the “Transylvanian twins,” the Tobiases have continued to expand their project in a logical and satisfying way, referencing the Russian avant-garde through typewriter drawings that recall El Lissitzky’s masterful designs for For the Voice and wood constructions that evoke works by Gustav Klutsis and other Constructivists, while also evoking traditional figures, forms, and patterns.

The Museum of Modern Art acquired three woodcuts by the Tobiases in 2006, including the untitled work shown here, which is on view in the current exhibition “Projects 86: Gert & Uwe Tobias,” on view through February 25. The image ties together many of the qualities present in their work. It gestures to abstraction and animation, has lush colors and strong graphic sensibility, and seems at first a bit cartoonish. On second glance it appears horrific, stripped to its bony spine with organs exposed and appendages missing. Look yet again and you see the friendly face of a winking peasant woman, a gap-toothed smile shining from beneath her head scarf, and two hearts beating inside her uncommonly kind chest. It is this deft layering of images and influences, by turns humorous and haunting, but always striking, that makes the work of Gert and Uwe Tobias so engaging.