Artist, designer of sci-fi film’s Alien
BERLIN — Swiss artist H.R. Giger, who designed the creature in Ridley Scott’s scifi horror classic Alien, has died at age 74 from injuries suffered in a fall, his museum said Tuesday.
Sandra Mivelaz, administrator of the H.R. Giger museum in Gruyeres, western Switzerland, said that Giger died in a hospital Monday.
Giger’s works, often showing macabre scenes of humans and machines fused into hellish hybrids, influenced a generation of movie directors and inspired an enduring fashion for “biomechanical” tattoos.
Born Hans Ruedi Giger on Feb. 5, 1940, in the southeastern Swiss town of Chur, he trained as an industrial designer because his father insisted that he learn a proper trade.
His mother, Melli, to whom he showed a lifelong devotion, encouraged her son’s passion for art, despite his unconventional obsession with death and sex that found little appreciation in 1960s rural Switzerland.
Giger’s vision of a human skull encased in a machine appeared on the cover of Brain Salad Surgery, a 1973 album by the rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Along with his design for Debbie Harry’s solo album, Koo Koo (1981), it featured in a 1991 Rolling Stone magazine list of the top 100 album covers of all time.
His works also appeared as cover art for bands such as the Dead Kennedys, Danzig and Celtic Frost.
Giger went on to work as a set designer for Hollywood, contributing to Species, Poltergeist II and most famously Alien, for which he received the 1979 Academy Award for special effects.
Information for this article was contributed by Deutsche Presse-Agentur and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette staff.