Background

Giger was born in Chur, Graubünden, Switzerland, on February 5, 1940. He was the second child to Melly Giger-Meier and Hans Richard Giger. He had a sister, Iris, who was seven years his senior. The children were treated kindly by their parents. The family lived in a modest, somewhat shabby apartment above the pharmacy where his father, a chemist, worked.

Education

Although H. R. Giger was interested in art since his early childhood, his father viewed art as a "breadless profession" and strongly encouraged Giger to follow his steps and to become a pharmacist.

In 1946 he began schooling, first attending the Catholic Marienheim, but later transferring to Auntie Grittli’s Reformational Kindergarten.

After graduating from high school in 1958, H. R. Giger received his certificate in drawing. It was followed by a couple of years of practical training from an architect and developer as well as completion of military college as a mortar gunner.

He moved to Zürich in 1962, where he studied architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts (today Zurich University of the Arts) until 1965.

Career

At the beginning of his career as an artist, Giger worked as an office furniture designer for Andreas Christen from 1966 until 1968. He produced some ink drawings, oil paintings and his first polyester sculptures in his free time.

In 1968 he left this job to entirely devote himself to creating art, including a commission to create movie props, which included designing his first extraterrestrial being.

Switzerland's first poster publishing company printed his collection of posters in 1969. The same year the first exhibition of his work took place outside of Zurich. H. R. Giger's style and thematic execution were extremely influential. Rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer asked him to create the cover of their 1973 album Brain Salad Surgery.

In the 1970s, H. R. Giger started to use an airbrush. He became known as the world's leading airbrush artist and developed his signature style of thoroughly rendered, otherworldly visions of the dreadful, depicted in grim grays and blacks.

Filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky invited Giger to collaborate as part of an all-star production team on the legendary unmade film, Dune, in 1976, for which the artist designed the sci-fi world of The Harkonnen.

After viewing H. R. Giger's images published in Necronomicon of 1977, director Ridley Scott hired him for the production of the science fiction film, Alien. The elaborate costume of the "Xenomorph" creature in the movie included Rolls-Royce parts, rib bones as well as reptile vertebrae. His design for the Alien was inspired by his painting Necronom IV.

In 1985 he was commissioned to design a series of horror scenes for the movie Poltergeist II. Right after the start of this project, H. R. Giger realized he was working on the wrong movie. He wasn't satisfied with the way in which his ideas were interpreted in the movie. The story itself didn't appeal to him and he was not sure of the quality of the final product. Although the Poltergeist movie was a great success in the United States, it actually failed in Europe.

Giger applied his biomechanical style to interior design. His first design of a total environment, the Giger Bar in Tokyo opened in 1988, but the realization of his designs was a great disappointment to him since the Japanese organization behind the venture did not wait for his final designs, instead, they used Giger's rough preliminary sketches. For that reason, Giger renounced the Tokyo bar.

At The Limelight, a nightclub, in Manhattan, Giger's artwork was used to decorate the VIP room, the uppermost chapel of the landmarked church. However, it was never intended to be a permanent installation and had no similarity to the bars in Switzerland. The arrangement to use the artworks was terminated after two years when the Limelight closed.

For the movie Alien 3 (1992), he designed the dog-like Alien body shape, plus a number of unused concepts, many mentioned on the special features disc of Alien 3, despite not being credited in the movie theatre version. In 1995 Giger designed a radically different version of the Batmobile for Batman Forever; however, his design was not used in the film.

The official Giger Internet site, www.HRGiger.com, went online on March 19, 1996, with more than 200,000 visitors from over 100 countries in the first year. The four-story H.R. Giger Museum was opened in June 1998, in the Chateau St. Germain, in Gruyères, Switzerland, the medieval walled city, housing the world's largest collection of his works.

On April 12, 2003, the official opening of the H.R. Giger Museum Bar took place. A 400-year-old space was transformed by Giger's characteristically grotesque but beautiful designs. Starting from 2004 major museums around the world honoured Giger with a series of retrospectives of his artworks.

Giger's oeuvre has greatly influenced different tattooists and fetishists. Under a licensing deal Ibanez guitars produced an H. R. Giger signature series: the Ibanez ICHRG2, an Ibanez Iceman, features "NY City VI", the Ibanez RGTHRG1 has "NY City XI" on it, the S Series SHRG1Z has a metal-coated engraving of "Biomechanical Matrix" printed on it, and a 4-string SRX bass, SRXHRG1, which features "N.Y. City X".

He was also well known for artworks for several music albums including previously mentioned Brain Salad Surgery by Emerson, Lake & Palmer (1973), Deborah Harry's KooKoo, and Danzig III: How The Gods Kill by Danzig (1992). Jonathan Davis, an American singer and musician, best known as the lead vocalist and frontman of the nu metal band Korn, commissioned H. R. Giger to design and sculpt a microphone stand, with the requirement that it be biomechanical, erotic, and movable. He was supposed to create five aluminium microphone stands, but Davis bought only two of the three to which he was entitled. The design of the microphone stand was later adapted to Giger's Nubian Queen, transforming the stand into a fine art sculpture.

H. R. Giger worked up to his death, leaving a huge amount of incomplete and unreleased projects.

Achievements

• 

  H. R. Giger was a distinguished artist, whose artworks were highly acclaimed. Giger's most prominent stylistic innovation was that of a representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, he described as "biomechanical." His style has been adapted to many forms of media, including record album covers, furniture, and tattoos.
  
  He was part of the special effects team that won an Academy Award for design work on the film Alien on April 14, 1980. On December 17, 2004, H. R. Giger received the prestigious award, Medal of the City of Paris, at Paris City Hall. Giger was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2013.
  
  In addition to his awards, Giger was recognized by a variety of festivals and institutions. On the one year anniversary of his death, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City presented the series The Unseen Cinema of HR Giger in May 2015.
  
  Dark Star: H. R. Giger's World, a biographical documentary by Belinda Sallin, came out on September 27, 2014, in Zurich, Switzerland. On July 11, 2018, the asteroid 109712 Giger was named after him.
  
  Today, many of his artworks are housed in the H. R. Giger Museum in Gruyères, Switzerland.

Works

More photos

• design

  • Entrance to Giger Bar in Chur

  • Ibanez H. R. Giger signature bass and guitars

  • Jonathan Davis's microphone stand

  • Nubian Queen

  • Harkonnen Chair

  • Pentagram Box with "Mystery of San Gottardo"-Pins

• painting

  • Work Nr. 217 ELP I

    (Brain Salad Surgery)

  • Work Nr. 217 ELP II

    (Brain Salad Surgery)

  • Study (Alien III)

  • Friedrich Kuhn

  • Macht und Ohnmacht

  • Alien III, sideview III (Work No. 372)

  • No. 250, Li I

  • Bierkrieg

  • Pisces zinc

  • Necronom IV

  • Biomechanoiden

  • Sheet from Biomechanoiden

  • Trip-Tychon

  • Landschaft VIII

  • Lord of the rings I

  • Sergius Golowin

  • Necronom VIII

  • Landscape XXII

  • Biomechanoid

  • Untitled

  • Landschaft X

  • Landschaft

  • Landschaft XXIV

• sculpture

  • Birth Machine

  • Alien III / Necronom

  • Kleiner Kopf

  • Grosser Kopf

  • Bambi Alien

  • Biomechanoid

Views

Quotations: "Some people say my work is often depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood, overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don't really think it is."

"The greatest compliment is when people get tattooed with my work, whether it’s done well or not. To wear something like that your whole life is the largest compliment someone can pay to you as an artist."

"My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy. If they like my work they are creative... or they are crazy."

"There is hope and a kind of beauty in there somewhere, if you look for it."

"I like elegance. I like art nouveau; a stretched line or curve. These things are very much in the foreground of my work."

"You know I was curious - I was interested in all kinds of mystery or deeper meanings in the paintings because I myself have not analyzed why they have turned out like this or like that."

"You get talent when you discover the ground of your pain."

"When the mouth is closed it looks very voluptuous, beautiful. But when it opens its jaws the tongue inside the mouth is more like a spear... also very suggestive... which penetrates the head with greater velocity, snagging bits of brain. From Beauty to the Beast."

Interests

• Artists

  Stanislas Szukalski, Austin Osman Spare, Mati Klarwein, Dado, Ernst Fuchs, Salvador Dalí

Connections

H. R. Giger had a nine-year romance with Swiss actress and his muse Li Tobler ended with her sudden suicide in 1975. Li's image appears in many of his paintings. Giger married Mia Bonzanigo in 1979; the couple divorced only a year and a half later. With his second wife, Carmen Maria Scheifele Giger, the Director of the H.R. Giger Museum, he wed in 2006.

Father:

Hans Richard Giger

Mother:

Melly Giger-Meier

Spouse:

Mia Bonzanigo

Spouse:

Carmen Maria Scheifele Giger

Sister:

Iris Giger

life partnter:

Li Tobler

Li Tobler (1947-1975) was a Swiss stage actress and model.

Friend:

Timothy Leary

Timothy Francis Leary (1920-1996) was an American psychologist and writer known for advocating the exploration of the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs under controlled conditions.

References

• Modern Consciousness Research and the Understanding of Art, including the Visionary World of H.R. Giger In 200 spellbinding pages including over 100 large, full-colour illustrations Modern Consciousness Research and the Understanding of Art takes readers on an enchanting tour of the human psyche and a visual tour of the artwork of H.R. Giger.
  2015
• H. R. Giger's Film Design H.R. Giger's Film Design details the remarkable design career of Academy Award-winning artist H.R. Giger.
  1996
• Giger Giger's multi-faceted career: From surrealistic dream landscapes to album cover designs, and sculpture.
  2001
• HR Giger and the Zeitgeist of the Twentieth Century This edition is a stunning compilation of paintings from the late surrealist artist H. R. Giger, brought together for the first time alongside a revealing essay by transpersonal psychologist and pioneer in consciousness research, Dr. Stanislav Grof.
  2018