H. R. Giger

Biography

In 1975 Giger was invited to work on “Dune”, which Alejandro Jodorowsky planned to film. For it he designed the world of the Harkonnens, including the well-known chair with three skulls stacked one on top of another. The film was never made: the financiers withdrew, and in 1976 the project was closed. The sketches were published in Giger’s books, and the film was later directed by David Lynch, who used only the artist’s rough concepts.

Giger was born on 5 February 1940 in Chur, in the canton of Graubünden, the son of a pharmacist. His father regarded art as a profession without bread and wanted his son to go into pharmacy. The boy grew up shy and was raised in the Catholic faith. His father is said to have once given him a real human skull; the detail sounds almost too neat for an artist’s biography, but it recurs in accounts of his childhood.

After secondary school and training as an architectural draughtsman, Giger moved to Zurich in 1962 and studied at the School of Applied Arts, in interior and industrial design. His first drawings, in pen and ink, were the series “Atomic Children”; they were printed in a school magazine and in the underground publications “Clou” and “Hotcha”. Dates vary: 1959, 1960 and the middle of the 1960s are all given. He also worked in his field, for the designer Andreas Christen, on an office furniture programme for Knoll International. His first paintings, mostly in oil, date from 1966.

From 1968 Giger lived solely on income from art and film. That year he worked with the director Fredi Murer on the film “Swiss Made 2069”: Giger designed an alien observer with a dog, and the polyester shell of that dog is now in the Dalí museum at Portlligat. The first posters of his work were printed in 1969 by Hans Heinrich Kunz, co-owner of Switzerland’s first poster publishing company; the first exhibitions took place at the same time. He also made short films of his own: “Tagtraum” (1973) and “Giger’s Necronomicon” (1975).

In 1972 he picked up the airbrush, and it became his main technique. Over the next twenty years he produced about 600 paintings in ink and acrylic, some of them more than four metres wide. The works are monochrome and cold: bodies and machines are joined in them like organs of a single organism. Among those said to have influenced him are Dado, Ernst Fuchs, Salvador Dalí, Gustave Moreau and Hans Bellmer. He was a friend of Timothy Leary, who wrote of his paintings as pictures from the memory of life before birth.

Recognition came with his books.

The third of them, “Necronomicon” (1977), reached Ridley Scott, who invited Giger to work on “Alien”. The creature goes back to his painting “Necronom IV”. Giger designed the xenomorph itself, the derelict spaceship and the “Space Jockey”, and at the 1980 Academy Awards the visual effects team received the prize, which he shared with his colleagues. In later films of the series his part was smaller: in the second he is credited only for the creature, and in the third he designed the dog-like body of the alien. He also worked on “Poltergeist II”, on “Species” (1995), for which he created the creature Sil, and on the Japanese film “Teito Monogatari” (1988); his sketch of a Batmobile for “Batman Forever” was not taken up by the studio. “Prometheus” (2012) brought his ship and the “Space Jockey” back to the screen, and there his authorship is credited.

Giger designed many record covers. The best known are “Brain Salad Surgery” by Emerson, Lake & Palmer (1973), Deborah Harry’s “KooKoo” (1981), “To Mega Therion” by Celtic Frost (1985), “Attahk” by Magma, “Heartwork” by Carcass and “Danzig III: How the Gods Kill”. The Dead Kennedys album “Frankenchrist” (1985) came with a poster of his “Landscape XX”; it led to an obscenity trial. For Korn’s vocalist Jonathan Davis he made an aluminium microphone stand, and with the firm Ibanez he produced a series of guitars. In the early 1990s Giger gave up painting and turned to three-dimensional work: he translated earlier paintings into sculpture and made the “Zodiac Fountain”, with the twelve signs as biomechanoids.

He also designed interiors. He disowned the Tokyo bar (1988): the clients did not wait for his final designs and used his first sketches. The bars in Chur (1992) and Gruyères were built under his supervision. He acquired Saint-Germain Castle in Gruyères in 1997 or 1998; in 1998 the museum that bears his name opened there, with his own works and a collection of fantastic art.

In 2013 Giger was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and in 2014 he received the Vincent Prize for lifetime achievement. He died on 12 May 2014 in a Zurich hospital, of injuries sustained in a fall. He is buried in the cemetery at Gruyères. In 2015 a square named after Giger was opened in Chur, and a memorial plaque was placed on his birthplace in Storchengasse.