h.r. giger

Hans Ruedi Giger (IPA: [ˈɡi ɡɚ]) (born at Chur, Grisons canton, February 5, 1940) is an Academy Award-winning Swiss painter, sculptor, and set designer best known for his design work on the film Alien.

Work

Giger's Alien design, inspired by his painting Necronom IV, earned him an Oscar in 1980. His fourth published book of paintings, titled Necronomicon (followed by Necronomicon II in 1985), continued his rise to international prominence, as did the frequent appearance of his art in the magazine Omni. Giger is also well known for artwork on a number of popular records, including Emerson Lake and Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery, Celtic Frost's To Mega Therion, Dead Kennedys' Frankenchrist, Debbie Harry's Koo Koo and Carcass's Heartwork.

Style

For most of his career, Giger has worked predominantly in airbrush, creating strange monochromatic canvasses depicting surreal, nightmarish landscapes. His most distinctive stylistic innovation is that of a representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, described as "biomechanical". His paintings often display fetishistic sexual imagery and are considered disturbing by some. His main influences were painters Ernst Fuchs and Salvador Dalí. He met Salvador Dalí, to whom he was introduced by painter Robert Venosa. He was also a personal friend of Timothy Leary. Giger is perhaps the best known sufferer of night terrors and his paintings are all to some extent inspired by his experiences with that particular sleep disorder. He was originally educated as an architect and made his first paintings as a way of art therapy.

Obscenity lawsuit

Giger's artwork for the Dead Kennedys' album Frankenchrist, Landscape XX (nicknamed Penis Landscape), was at the center of an obscenity lawsuit against Jello Biafra.

Other works

Giger has created furniture designs, particularly the Harkonnen Capo Chair for an unproduced movie version of the novel Dune that was originally slated to be directed by Alejandro Jodorowski. Many years later, David Lynch directed the film, using only extremely limited rough ideas from Giger and Jodorowski. Giger had wished to work with Lynch, as he had said that Lynch's film Eraserhead was the closest thing to portraying Giger's art in film (even including the films that Giger himself had worked on), as cited in one of Giger's Necronomicon books.

Giger has applied his biomechanical style to interior design, and several "Giger Bars" sprung up in Tokyo, New York, and his native Switzerland, although most of the bars have since closed. His art has greatly influenced tattooists and fetishists worldwide. Ibanez guitars has released an H.R. Giger signature series; the Ibanez ICHRG2, an Ibanez Iceman, features the work "NY City VI", and the Ibanez RGTHRG1 has the work "NY City XIX" printed on it.

Giger also designed an elaborate microphone stand for Jonathan Davis, lead singer of the band Korn.

Pop culture

Movies

• Dune (designs for unproduced Alejandro Jodorowsky adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel)
• Alien (designed, among other things, the Alien itself)
• Poltergeist II
• Killer Condom
• Species
• Batman Forever (designed radically different envisioning of the Batmobile; design not used in the film)

Work for recording artists

• Celtic Frost
• Magma
• Emerson Lake and Palmer
• Deborah Harry (from Blondie)
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• Danzig
• Dead Kennedys' album Frankenchrist, Poster insert of Landscape XX
• Atrocity
• Black Sun Productions
• Korn's Jonathan Davis commissioned Giger to sculpt his microphone stand
• Carcass used Life Support 1993 for the cover of their 1994 album, Heartwork.
• Designed the stage for Mylene Farmer's 1999 "Mylenium" tour.
• Blondie's Chris Stein commissioned Lieber Guitars to create Stein's unique "Gigerstein" guitar based on Giger's artwork.

Interior decoration

• Giger Bars in Switzerland's Chur and Gruyères
• Museum H. R. Giger in Gruyères

Computer games

• Dark Seed and its sequel, Dark Seed II, both adventure games for the PC, Amiga, and the Amiga CD32, were published by Cyberdreams. The games were also released for the PlayStation and Saturn in Japan.

Giger is often referenced in pop culture and especially in works of the science fiction and cyberpunk genres. Novelist William Gibson (who wrote an early script for Alien³) seems particularly fascinated, presenting in Virtual Light a minor character, Lowell, with New York XXIV tattooed across his back. As well, Yamazaki, a secondary character in Idoru specifically describes the buildings of nanotech Japan as Giger-esque.