The Ruffled Crow

Hans Rudolf Giger died yesterday from complications arising from a fall. He was 74 years old.

Emerson, Lake, and Palmer – Brain Salad Surgery album art.

The first time I saw the art of HR Giger, I didn’t know it. It was the cover of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery album. Even though it was about their best album, I liked the cover better.

The next time was on the cover and in the pages of Heavy Metal Magazine. The June 1980 issue, to be precise. HM had been running ads for Giger’s Necronomicon for a while, but that issue had a full spread of his art.

I don’t think I need to say much about his work in Alien (and other movies) and his subsequent success except to mention the Oscar he won for the movie and his induction into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2013.

Thankfully there is a HR Giger Museum in Gruyères, Switzerland and, even better, the website has an online virtual tour. Worth the ‘walk’.

June 80 issue with the HR Giger gallery. Made me a lifelong HM fan.

His ‘Biomechanoids’ were both unsettling and sensuous, mixing death and eroticism. Giger’s art reached into our little Freudian souls and dragged out hidden fantasies, bloody and wriggling.

His most distinctive stylistic innovation was that of a representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, he described as “biomechanical”. 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.  via

The art world lost a genuine surrealistic master in H R Giger.

Here are some of my favorites of his.

Necronom IV – The inspiration for the Alien

Alien Pilot

Dune IV – artwork from an unproduced Dune movie (Frank Herbert)

The Spell IV from Giger’s Necronomicon

Landscape XIX

Alien artwork, 1977