An inspiration to uncountable artists without a doubt, a man who's work one probably has seen more then heard his name...
HR Giger is an Academy Award-winning Swiss painter, sculptor, and set designer best known for his design work on the film Alien. Giger's unique style and thematic execution is frequently imitated in modern art practice. His design for the Alien was inspired by his painting Necronom IV and earned him an Oscar in 1980. His third 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.
Giger got his start with small ink drawings before progressing to oil paintings. For most of his career, Giger has worked predominantly in airbrush, creating monochromatic canvasses depicting surreal, nightmarish dream-scapes. He has largely abandoned large airbrush works in favor of works with pastels, markers or ink. 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. 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.
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. 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" sprang up in Tokyo, New York, and his native Switzerland, although most of the bars have since closed. One such example was The Limelight in Manhattan, circa 1993 -- at the time, its bars featured faux embryos in jars, floating in a backlit pinkish fluid. 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", the Ibanez RGTHRG1 has the work "NY City XI" printed on it, and the S Series SHRG1Z has a metal coated engraving of the work "Biomechanical Matrix" on it. There is also a 4 string SRX bass; SRXHRG1, that has "N.Y. City X" printed on it. wiki
The album cover is considered one of the most memorable (and often disturbing) of its time. It features distinctive Giger monochromatic biomechanical artwork, integrating an industrial mechanism with a human skull and the new ELP logo (created by Giger). The lower part of the skull's face is covered by a circular "screen", which shows the mouth and lower face in its flesh-covered state. In the original LP release, the front cover was split in half down the center, except for the circular screen section (which was attached to the right half). Opening the halves revealed a painting of the complete face: a human female (modelled after Giger's wife), with "alien" hair and multiple scars, including the infinity symbol and a scar from a frontal lobotomy. The two images of the woman are very similar, but the outer image (in the circle) contains what appears to be the top of a phallus below her chin, arising from the "ELP" column below (the second painting originally had the complete phallus, but this was removed at the insistence of the record company). The back cover was solid black with the album title in plain white lettering.
On later vinyl printings (and most CD releases), the front cover is a single piece, and the alternate ("face") view is used on the back cover. However, the 1993 Victory Music CD reissue packaged the album in a special Digipak with the original split cover art, which also unfolded to reveal a small poster with the lyrics and band photos from the original album inner sleeve.
Both paintings were created in pure shades of grey airbrush, to appear metallic and mechanical. However, on some releases of the album, the cover was printed with too much red, making the image (in Giger's words) "cow-shit-pile-brown".
Giger's ELP logo, using a circular enclosure of the "E" and upper portion of the "P", around a column formed by the "L" and the vertical of the "P", became a standard for the band and has been used extensively since.
The paintings for the cover are titled "Work #217 ELP I" and "Work #218 ELP II". The original acrylic-on-paper paintings were lost (or stolen) after a Giger exhibition at the National Technical Museum in Prague, which ended August 31, 2005. wiki
To Mega Therion (meaning the great beast in Greek) is the second album by the Swiss extreme metal band, Celtic Frost. It was released in October 1985, and was a major influence on the developing death metal and black metal genres. The cover artwork is a painting by H.R. Giger entitled Satan I. wiki
Copies of Giger's Work 219: Landscape XX, better known as Penis Landscape, were included in an insert with the Dead Kennedys album Frankenchrist, and became the centerpiece of a 1986 obscenity lawsuit against Eric Reed Boucher, a.k.a. Jello Biafra, the vocalist and songwriter for the San Francisco punk rock band.
HR Giger homepage
HR Giger online museum
HR Giger database
HR Giger @ wikipedia
HR Giger documentary Sanctuary homepage
HR Giger music related links
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