H G Giger

H R Giger is a Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer that has done a great deal of work for films and musicians as well as his personal work. 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, nighmareish dreamscapes. However, he has now 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 Dali. 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 keeps an artist's pad near his bed to draw out his nightmares. It was in this fashion that he came up with horrific designs of the monsters for Alien. He studied interior and industrial design at the School of Commercial Art in Zurich (from 1962 to 1970) and made his first paintings as a means of art therapy.

Giger has won many awards for his work, such as the design for the alien in the film “Alien”, which was inspired by his painting Necronom IV and earned him an Oscar in 1980. His books of paintings, particularly Necronomicon and Necronomicon II which were made in 1985 and his work frequently appears Omni magazine which has continued his rise to international prominence.

I am a huge fan of Giger’s work, his work reminds me of a darker and morbid version of Dali, and I love the great amount of detail that goes into his work. And just a bit of trivia; he designed Jonathan Davis’ (the lead singer of KoRn) microphone stand. The design of the stand was later adapted to Giger's "Nubian Queen" transforming it into a fine art sculpture.