shelidonNovember 18, 2024Leave a Comment

Turin mounted a small but very nice exhibition with some fine pieces I had never seen before. The concept is that H.R. Giger, the Swiss visionary behind the xenomorph in Alien, is so much more than that. I was already familiar with the rest of his production, but it was nice to see.

Can’t get to Turin? Speak no Italian? I’ve got you covered.

1. Early Childhood: the Kid with the Skull

H.R. Giger was born on February 5, 1940 as Hansruedi Giger in Chur, a small town in Switzerland’s Grisons region. Son of a pharmacist, he described his childhood as peaceful and happy. Yet, being born in the middle of World War II left him with an unease he could never shake. As he once put it, “What I remember most was the collective fear of that time… and as a kid, you couldn’t understand it. That was the worst part—feeling something was wrong without knowing what.”

Young Hansruedi spent his days in his family’s pharmacy, fascinated by colorful, sometimes blood-filled bottles and peculiar medical tools from the time. His curiosity about the morbid quickly grew stronger—so much so that his father gave him the gift of a human skull he in turn had received from a supplier. He was hooked, and at age 5, he could be found carrying the skull around like a pup on a leash.

Giger was also captivated by the mummies at the Rätisches Museum, which he visited for the first time with his sister. While other kids sat dutifully in church, Giger would hang out by the mummy of an Egyptian princess, both horrified and mesmerized.

From an early age, beauty and horror were intertwined for Giger. The allure of the strange and dark captured him entirely, influencing his art and giving him endless inspiration.

However, the same father who gave him the gift of a human skull wasn’t too thrilled about his artistic inclinations and pushed him towards a “real” job. After some tough negotiations, Giger enrolled as a technical draftsman and later attended the School of Applied Arts in Zurich. Though he never officially worked as a draftsman, the precision and industrial style he developed there would forever influence his unique aesthetic.

At art school, Giger honed his skills in drawing robotic and mechanical details with intense precision. He also discovered Sigmund Freud, began keeping a dream journal, and channeled his nightmares into art. In the world of independent art, his name started to rise, especially in the underground counterculture scene, where his work found a home on album covers.

After finishing his studies, he expanded his toolkit with ink and other drawing materials. Eventually, in the early ‘70s, he embraced acrylics and airbrush, which became his trademark.

2. Influences

Although H.R. Giger’s art defies all categories and conventions, a few artists managed to influence and shape his work. These include early inspirations like Salvador Dalí and Ernst Fuchs, whom he had the chance to meet, and Jean Cocteau. But he was also inspired by some “classic weirdos” like Hieronymus Bosch, Arcimboldo, and Piranesi.

To young Giger, the greatest painter in the world was Ernst Fuchs, founder of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. Giger’s fascination with surrealism was truly sparked when he saw a work by Salvador Dalí for the first time, or even better, when he watched Dalí’s version of Beauty and the Beast by Jean Cocteau.

Among his many influences, one of the most life-changing was meeting Li Tobler, a beautiful Swiss actress he encountered in 1966. They were inseparable and moved in together, forming a powerful bond that would be both romantic and artistically inspiring.

On May 19, 1975, after years of battling depression, Li took her own life with a gun. This tragic event left Giger devastated, profoundly impacting both his life and his art. She was only 27, and her death marked a dark period in his work. The pieces he created that year are some of his most haunting and macabre.

The face of Li Tobler in the works Li I and Li II captures the essence of Giger’s aesthetics and philosophy. In both pieces, the head of the subject is severed, surrounded by elements that clearly reference the classical image of Medusa—think Caravaggio’s haunting Shield with the Head of Medusa. But unlike Medusa’s screaming, monstrous face, Li’s features are calm, serene, yet intense, as if she’s shrouded in a ghostly mist, reminiscent of corpses not long after death.

Li is both alive and dead, detached from her body—if she ever had one. Her face is covered in tubes, mysterious machinery, and surrounded by insectoid figures. Key symbols include skulls and a serpent, which winds across her forehead in both paintings. In ancient Egyptian culture, beloved by Giger, the serpent symbolizes rebirth and healing but also transformation and immortality. Here, it seems almost to foreshadow the tragic fate awaiting Li.

Li I and Li II remain two of Giger’s most iconic works. In the alien female forms in his later work, you can always spot elements echoing the features of his lost partner.

3. Giger and Cinema

“I do whatever I want: sculpture, painting, design, interior architecture, industrial design, and I also write. This kind of multidisciplinarity has been very useful in my film experience.
Films fascinate me, I am fascinated by them because I believe they have surpassed painting as an artistic medium in this century.”
– H.R. Giger

Giger was essentially saying, “I dabble in everything, and I love movies because they’re like the ultimate form of art now.” It captures his multifaceted approach and his belief.

While Giger is universally known as the mastermind behind the visuals of the Alien franchise, his journey into the world of cinema began long before his encounter with director Ridley Scott.

In 1967, Giger met writer Sergius Golowin and filmmaker Fredi Murer. He joined a filmmaking contest and even created a documentary about his paintings. In 1968, Murer hired him to make models for a short film called Swissmade, Giger’s first experience crafting monstrous alien creatures for the screen.

In the early ’70s, Giger’s exhibitions often featured documentary films shot with his friend J.J. Wittmer. A notable example is Giger’s Necronomicon in 1975, which was partially filmed during a collective exhibition where his partner Li Tobler was also exhibiting.

When filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky—known for El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973)—set out to make a film adaptation of Frank Herbert‘s Dune, he dreamed big. He wanted stars like Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, and Salvador Dalí, and he was determined to bring Giger on board. Fascinated by Giger’s “sick art,” Jodorowsky wanted his designs for the Harkonnen world.

Giger designed Giedi Prime, the Harkonnen home world, for what was meant to be Jodorowsky’s masterpiece. Later, on Dune, Giger met Dan O’Bannon, the screenwriter who would soon come to him with a new project: Alien. The two formed a strong bond, based on a shared passion for military horror and sci-fi aesthetics.

In the fall of 1977, after publishing Necronomicon, a compilation of his works, Giger sent a copy to O’Bannon, who showed it to Ridley Scott. Scott instantly knew Giger was the right artist to bring Alien’s universe to life. In February 1978, 20th Century Fox and Giger sealed the deal, and he produced around thirty airbrushed paintings that outlined every stage of the alien’s evolution, as well as the planet and spaceship settings. The rest, as they say, is history.

On August ’77, I get a call from O’Bannon. He asks me if I’d like to do something for a film called Alien. I say yes, why not. But I think I have to handle the question of payment better this time: I’ve never seen a penny from Jodorowsky. He has never even called to say: “I’m sorry, but the film is longer being made”.

With his creation of the inhuman Xenomorph, Giger stunned the world, setting a new standard for sci-fi and horror visuals. In 1980, his undeniable talent was officially recognized when he won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

The connection between H.R. Giger and cinema continued in the following years with various projects, though they didn’t all take off. For example, he created seventy drawings for The Tourist for Universal, concepts for The Mirror for 20th Century Fox, and even designs for a film adaptation of Momo, Michael Ende’s children’s book, for Rialto Film.

During the production of Aliens, the second chapter of the Xenomorph saga directed by James Cameron, Giger wasn’t invited and, instead, he got involved in creating a demonic creature resembling a Gorgon called the “Great Beast” for the film Poltergeist II by Brian Gibson. Alongside the “Great Beast,” Giger was asked to imagine a whole series of characters and nightmare visions meant to evoke a sense of dread and eerie silence in the film.

Giger contributed to Poltergeist II, providing about twenty sketches, ideas, and advice for a movie that did well at the box office. Although Giger’s designs for Poltergeist II were incredibly creative and atmospheric, they didn’t quite make it to the screen as he’d envisioned. In fact, Giger later said he found the final creature a “terrible distortion” of his original artwork, feeling his vision had been flattened and completely altered.

This disappointment for his Gorgon was only made worse when he discovered Aliens had been produced without his involvement—a real shock at the time. However, he later acknowledged that he admired the “Alien Queen” created by James Cameron and Stan Winston, even if he wasn’t part of its design.

In 1990, he began yet another abandoned project, Ridley Scott’s The Train—a year of frustration for Giger. But the next year, he returned to familiar territory with Alien III. In the mid-90s, he also worked on Species (1995), a sci-fi horror film by R. Donaldson based on D. Feldman’s script. Giger’s designs brought an eerie beauty and a ghostly train to life.

Giger’s skills were diverse, spanning graphic design, illustration, sculpture, interior design, and painting. His dark, unsettling aesthetic was sought by directors like Cronenberg and Lynch, who shared his love for haunting, oppressive visuals.

In a 1979 Starlog interview, he was asked, “What’s the future for H.R. Giger? Will you keep working in film?” Giger, with his signature intensity, replied, “Some people think cinema is a low art. Dalí focused on theater, opera, and ballet. He even made a dream sequence for Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). But this way of thinking is outdated. We need to shake things up and move beyond the old school!”

“To say that Giger is the artist of Alien is like saying that Michelangelo is only the set designer of the film The Agony and the Ecstasy.”
— Clive Barker

4. The Biomechanoid

Starting in 1967-68, Giger gave life to a new subject: a strangely unsettling yet empathetic human mass, the Biomechanoids. With these works, Giger took his art from the grotesque to pure horror. The Biomechanoids look like tomorrow’s humans, viewed through the lens of a pessimistic utopia where science fiction ascends to a higher level, though not purified in any classical sense.

Giger’s future humans might as well be labeled mutants. Their anatomy shows as much mutation as evolution. They wear gas masks, antennas, artillery parts, or medical devices and are entirely fused or inescapably trapped within fantastic machinery.

In 1968, Giger created his Gebarmachine or Birth Machine using ink on wood. This piece marks the end of an early phase in Giger’s career and is the height of his raw style, full of dark humor from that period. In it, we see the cross-section of an automatic firearm (Giger was quite the gun collector, with over 60 in his possession) aimed upward. In the barrel, small, identical humans are lined up, almost like they’re part of an assembly line. According to Giger, these tiny beings are fired into a brutalized, polluted world, equipped with diving helmets and tiny machine guns as protection.

Giger once mentioned he had a very difficult birth, not only requiring forceps but also leaving him with some hazy memory of it (which isn’t scientifically possible, or so I’m told). Perhaps that’s why one of his recurring nightmares involved being in a huge room with only one way out. In the dream, he would start to panic, trying to escape through a narrow tunnel that got tighter and tighter, only to get stuck at the end by something as small as a paper clip. The real terror struck when he realized he couldn’t go back because his hands were tied.

5. A Reflection on Cities and Spaces

Beyond his extraordinary technical skills, one of Giger’s greatest strengths was his ability to stage the drama of a post-human daily life. In his works, organic forms invade and overwhelm, sneaking into urban settings—even when the cityscape should be the main star.

The acrylics he dedicated to New York make this clear. Here, Giger portrays the tiny scale of an electronic circuit, a biomechanical path, a system that seems to function all on its own, against the rigid, crystalline geometry of New York skyscrapers. Organic forms latch onto the harsh, angular skyline, sprawling across the bustling landscape of apartments, cubicles, and residential cells.

From microscopic to gargantuan, from the teeming underground life to the neo-gothic glow of forgotten megacities lost in the haze of a dull fate, Giger once again blends biology with technology, landscape with character—just like in his Biomechanical Landscapes.

In Giger’s paintings, the background often merges with the subjects, engulfing and feeding off them. Sometimes, the subjects themselves form the backdrop. This is what we see in his Biomechanical Landscapes series.

Titanium bones and exo-endoskeletons, flesh and elastic membranes, tubes and veins emerge indifferently, forming machine-bodies, nerve corridors, tortured cyborgs, and serially reproduced sexual organs.

The structures in Giger’s works resemble parts of enormous machines that integrate living beings. Giger isn’t as interested in what these machines do as he is in their sheer existence and endless possibilities. Like multiplying cells, the metal of everyday objects works its way under our skin, changing us, enriching us, and forever altering our bodies and senses.

The Mystery of San Gottardo, a set of pieces I wasn’t familiar with, revolves around the Saint Gotthard Pass, a mountain crossing in the Swiss Alps that has always served as a crucial link between northern and southern Europe. This pass, rich with historical, mystical, and cultural significance, inspired Giger deeply. Fascinated by ancient myths, legends, and the eerie atmosphere of the Gotthard region, he set out to create an evocative project full of mysterious symbols and haunting landscapes.

Giger began working on this project in the early ‘60s, and although he continued for decades, The Mystery of San Gottardo only saw the light as a book in 1998. The story centers on a man and his love for nature, featuring a character named Armbeinda—a sentient creature combining an arm and a leg.

The idea for this creature was born from a 1963 sketch titled The Begger, which depicts a leg and an arm holding a hat, a motif Giger repeated in several notebooks. This race of biomechanoids is created by a military organization, and the project explores the grotesque idea of what might happen if arms and legs, usually at our service, developed minds of their own and were “liberated.”

6. Going Cosmic

The Surrealist movement, born in France after World War I, aimed to explore and express the real workings of the mind beyond the control of reason and free from any aesthetic or moral influence. One of Surrealism’s cornerstones is that the unconscious holds the deepest and truest roots of reality. H.R. Giger drew inspiration from surrealist greats like Salvador Dalí, Hans Bellmer, and Max Ernst. While Surrealism is best known for artists like Dalí, Ernst, and Magritte, it focused on exploring the unconscious, dreams, and alternative realities. Giger absorbed these themes, adding a dark, technological aesthetic influenced by biomechanics.

In an interview, Giger himself said, “The style that influenced me the most was Art Nouveau, for the elegance of its shapes and drawings. My biomechanoids are influenced by this style, which is architectural and combines machines with a streamlined concept of progress.”

Giger’s fascination with biomechanics comes from blending anatomical, technological, and visionary elements. His work often critiqued the dehumanization brought about by rampant technology. Giger reinterpreted modern society, exploring the fusion of organic and mechanical forms, creating worlds that seemed both alive and artificial. His forms evoke a sense of alienation and discomfort, reflecting a modern interpretation of existence while embodying the fears and anxieties of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Giger believed that with the advent of new technologies, humans would evolve into a hybrid, half-living, half-mechanical species—a concept that fascinated him. In his words: “New forms, new possibilities—and fear, too. I believe that as we approach the end of the second millennium, humanity is going through a moment of reflection and reevaluation, of both its evolution and a return to the past.”

One of Giger’s deepest cultural influences was H.P. Lovecraft, whose work provided a foundation for Giger’s Necronomicon. Published in 1977, the Necronomicon is essentially a collection of Giger’s most famous works and pays tribute to Lovecraft with its title. Howard Phillips Lovecraft—writer, poet, literary critic, and essayist—was recognized as a major influence in horror, standing alongside Edgar Allan Poe. Considered by many as a forerunner of modern science fiction and the father of Cosmicism, Lovecraft’s philosophy emphasized humanity’s insignificance within the vast, indifferent universe—an idea that resonated deeply with Giger. Lovecraft often mentioned the Necronomicon, a fictional book of magic written by the “mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred. According to Lovecraft, it was a mysterious text torn to pieces by an invisible force—a concept that Giger found inspiring.

7. Giger and Music

Another field where H.R. Giger lent his artistic touch was music. Since 1969, Giger created various album covers—the first being for The Shiver. However, his big break in the music world came in 1973 when Emerson, Lake & Palmer commissioned him to create the cover for what would become one of his most iconic works, Brain Salad Surgery, now a widely reproduced image and a masterpiece exhibited in Prague in 2005. The cover consists of two parts: the outer sleeve shows a female face, while the inner sleeve reveals mechanical parts. Giger’s decision to feature a woman’s face contrasted starkly with the imagery typically associated with hard rock, marking a bold statement that redefined album art.

Giger’s connection to music is further illustrated by another genre classic, the 1981 cover for KooKoo, the debut album by Debbie Harry, the iconic Blondie singer. For the cover of Debbie Harry’s album KooKoo, Giger immortalized the captivating singer with a face that’s almost catatonic—not blonde, colourful, or lively as she was known as the frontwoman of Blondie, but pallid with dark hair, and her face pierced with large needles. The idea of the needles, giving the work a slightly funereal air, came to Giger after receiving acupuncture treatment from his friend and doctor Paul Tobler, brother of his late partner Li Tobler. With the four needles, Giger symbolized the four elements of nature. This eerie yet captivating image was an unusual cover for a pop album: it sparked controversy and banned posters in public spaces due to its shocking visuals.

As Jimmy Page, founder of Led Zeppelin, noted, the sensuality of this image is subtle and understated, adding a new layer to the public’s perception of Debbie Harry, who was previously seen as the Marilyn Monroe of Rock.

Over the years, Giger collaborated with a diverse array of musicians, from punk to metal. One of his most famous partnerships was with Thomas Fischer, founder of Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, and Triptykon, who admired Giger’s work. Fischer saw in Giger a kindred spirit, someone who shared a fascination for darker themes, and their collaboration continued for years. One piece, The Spell, held special meaning for Giger. Created in 1977, this artwork embodied his vision of the fusion of flesh and metal and became a defining image of the Metal scene. Fischer eventually used it for To Mega Therion, which, thanks to Giger’s artwork, became one of the iconic records in the history of Metal.

In 2010, Fischer, working with Triptykon, asked Giger to use Vlad Tepes, a 1978 artwork depicting the face of Dracula, for their album Eparistera Daimones. Giger was thrilled to see his art applied in the music world again. Giger even said, “When I made this drawing, I had the idea of creating a separate world.”

Ten years after his passing, a world without H.R. Giger feels like a world missing something truly otherworldly.