Three years after the death of HR Giger, the medieval city of Gruyères has finally come to terms with the unsettling legacy of the Oscar-winning creator of the creatures from the film Alien. (SRF, swissinfo.ch)
Besides designing the monstrous characters and set props for the 1979 science-fiction horror film, Alien, Hans Rudolf Giger is also well known for his sculptures, paintings and furniture in his unmistakable biomechanoid style .
A native of the city of Chur and a resident of Zurich for most of his life, Giger chose the walled city of Gruyères also known for the cheese by the same name, as a permanent home for many of his most prominent works.
The HR Giger MuseumExternal link in Château St. Germain, inaugurated in 1998, is managed by his second wife Carmen Scheifele Giger and contains the largest collection of the artist’s works.
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Documentary shines light on H.R. Giger’s dark world
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Best known for his monster in Alien, Swiss artist H.R. Giger was ignored by the mainstream. A new film shows how he lived in the darkness.
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The works of Swiss artist HR Giger often came under attack for being explicit and pornographic. But Giger’s art was not obscene. The world he created was an expression of his darkest thoughts in what he considered to be a form of therapy. His biomechanical style was the result of what was at the time,…
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Tom Gabriel Fischer, a close friend and musician, said those people who refuse to take HR Giger’s works seriously are missing out on “infinitely much”. Other guests at the assembly at the Fraumünster – one of Zurich’s main churches – described Giger’s work as “so dark, but also so beautiful” and the artist as “a…
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Hans Ruedi Giger was a surrealist painter, sculptor and set designer. He was born in Chur, Switzerland in 1940, and later studied architecture and industrial design at Zurich’s School of Applied Arts. He developed a freehand airbrush painting style that he used to great effect in his “biomechanical” landscape artworks. He gained a new level…
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The terrifying creature and sets he created for Ridley Scott’s film earned him an Oscar for special effects in 1980. In the art world, Giger is appreciated for his wide body of work in the fantastic realism and surrealistic genres. His talent for scaring movie audiences was repeated in Poltergeist 2 (1986), Alien 3 (1992)…
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If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.