H.R.
Giger
Hans Rudolf “Ruedi” Giger is a
Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor and set designer. Born February 5th
1940, Giger’s style of art had become incredibly influential in recent years.
One notable award he has one is the academy award for “Best Achievement for
Visual Effects” for his involvement in the 1979 Sci-fi thriller “Alien”.
Giger initially started with
small ink drawings before moving on to oil paintings. Afterwards, and for most
of all his career, Giger predominantly used airbrushing on canvas. His artworks
are typically monochromatic, lacking any sort of colour which contributes to
the dark gothic style of his paintings. Some of his artwork depicts unnatural
and macabre landscapes, creating a feeling of an alien world. A common theme in
his artwork is the depiction of the human body. Many times parts of the human
body have been represented as pieces of machinery and on occasion actually have
flesh and machine merge into each other which Giger himself dubs
“Biomechanical”. Another common theme in Giger’s work is his sexualising of his
art. Nude women frequently appear in his work as well as several pieces of
machinery shaped like phallic symbols. However because of the aforementioned
Biomechanical aspect of his art working in conjunction with this, Giger uses
this to disturb his audience rather than raise feelings of arousal because of
how unnatural it is.
However, Giger hasn’t just
restricted himself to painting standalone art pieces. He has also involved
himself in the movies, mostly on the Sci-Fi genre. His most notable film
involvement has been in the film “Alien” and in the Alien franchise as a whole.
His most notable contribution to the movie was the creature design on the
eponymous “Alien”. He also was in charge of the set design for the alien world,
derelict ship and the creature design for the “Facehugger” and “Space Jockey”.
Giger has made returns to the Alien Franchise with designs, but with less of
his designs being used with each progressive film. His most recent return film
was the 2012 “Prometheus” which in itself is a Pseudo-Prequel to the Alien
franchise. On a side note, during the 60’s and 70’s, Giger tried his hand at
directing movies, but only made four before dropping the idea completely.
Giger has also made
contributions to a variety of music artists, typically helping to design an
album cover. On notable request he received from a music artist was from
Jonathan Davis, the lead singer of Korn. Davis commissioned Giger to design and
sculpt a microphone stand with the requirements that it be “Biomechanical,
Erotic and flexible enough to move”. Giger later re-used the design of the
microphone stand to a fine-art piece.
Gigers designing style has also
been included into video games. He produced artwork to be used in the
point-and-click psychological horror game “Dark Seed” and later re-used in the
sequel “Dark Seed 2”. The artwork was used as the landscape design for the
“Dark World” where everything is in the same place as the normal world, but
everything has been designed in a Biomechanical style.
Artists such as Salvador Dali,
Alfred Kubin and Ernst Fuchs have been known to have influenced Giger’s style
of art. Many pieces of his artwork are actually the results of art therapy due
to Giger suffering from routine Night Terrors. Giger himself has inspired and
influenced a large amount of people. Under a licensing deal, a guitar company
called “Ibanez” released a series of guitars themed on Giger’s style of art.
Furthermore, dedicated “Giger Bars” that he himself designed has sprung up
around Switzerland (and a short-lived one in Japan that Giger disowned for only
using the rough sketches of his design). As of 2009, there are only two Giger
Bars still left open.
Personally, I really like his
artwork. I like how when you first see one of his pictures, it looks like an
incoherent mess of lines and shading. But as you look closer, you begin to
notice that you can make out relatively familiar things like hands and feet.
Then you suddenly realise that that previously muddled image actually resembles
something relatively humanoid, but can’t truly be called human. His artwork
triggers a feeling of discomfort, which is what Giger was aiming to do in the
first place as these images are literally the results of his nightmares. I also
like his alien landscape paintings as well as the set design for “Alien”
because it genuinely looks out of place from any other existing location in the
world, and the dull, monochromatic shading really emphasises the otherworldly
and cold atmosphere in his paintings. His work is genuinely disturbing,
especially the painting’s where there is a nude woman, but her head is that of
the Alien creature from the alien franchise.
