Hans Ruedi Giger (pronounced: GEE-ger) (born at Chur, Grisons canton, February 5, 1940) is a Swiss painter best known for his design work on the film Alien.
Work
Giger's Alien design, inspired by his painting "Necronom V", 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 and Debbie Harry's KooKoo.
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 biomechanics, a representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship. His paintings often display fetishistic sexual imagery and are considered disturbing by some. Some of his paintings also feature Satanic imagery, though Giger himself is not known to be a Satanist. He is largely inspired by Salvador Dalí and was a personal friend of Timothy Leary.
Obscenity lawsuit
Giger's artwork for the Dead Kennedys' album Frankenchrist, called Penis Landscape, or 'work 219: Landscape XX', was at the center of an obscenity lawsuit against Jello Biafra.
Other works
He has also 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 none of Giger's designs). Giger has also applied his biomechanical style to interior design, and several "Giger Bars" sprung up in Tokyo, New York, and his native Switzerland, although the foreign bars have since closed. His art has greatly influenced tattooists and fetishists worldwide. He has also designed the pattern on a series of Ibanez guitars, which includes the standard Ibanez shape, and the Iceman.
Pop culture
Movies
Work for recording artists
- Celtic Frost
- Magma
- Emerson Lake and Palmer
- Deborah Harry (from Blondie)
- hide
- Danzig
- Atrocity
- Black Sun Productions
- KoЯn'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.
Interior decoration
- Giger Bars in Switzerland's Chur and Gruyères
- Museum H. R. Giger in Gruyères
Computer games
- Dark Seed and its sequel, both adventure games for the PC. They were also released for the Playstation 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 the original 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.