In the foreground is Giger's "Nubian Queen" -- an aluminum statue of a sexy, machinelike woman, reminiscent of Giger's work in Alien. In the background is the painting "The Way of the Magician." "NUBIAN QUEEN" © 2002, H.R. Giger, Ltd. Edition of six, cast aluminum, 72 inches. "The Way of the Magician," 1975. Photo © 2002, Marc Adrian Villas. NEW YORK -- H.R. Giger has designed some of the most disturbing images of the past 35 years, most notably the ferocious Alien in Ridley Scott's classic horror flick. His sadistic, erotic blends of man and machine have been turned into some of the best-known, most controversial album art ever. And, recently, he attracted a parade of leather-clad worshippers, freakish even by New York standards, to his first exhibition here since 1994.
But at heart, the notoriously reclusive, eccentric artist insists, he's a mama's boy.
"I was afraid to go out of my mother," said Hans Rudi Giger (pronounced "gee-ger"), who was born in 1940 in the Swiss mountain town of Chur. "I had a very [difficult] birth. My mother said I didn't want to leave."
His father, a pharmacist, was the practical parent, the strict one. Mom encouraged her son's artistic talent, bringing home modeling clay.
"I was my mother's favorite, and she'd help me with everything," he writes in his book, www HRGiger com.
In his parents' house, Giger would travel down "steep and treacherous wooden stairways that lead into the yawning abyss" of a courtyard in the back. There, Giger explains in another book, Necronomicon, he built model skeletons from cardboard and plaster. From his father, Giger obtained a human skull, which he's kept to this day. He has eight complete skeletons in his Zurich home.
As a kid, Giger would paint images of powerful trains constantly. And he became obsessed with guns.
"I could've armed 20 people by the time I was 10," he recalls in www HRGiger com.
That came to a halt four years later, when he kissed a girl for the first time. "From then on, I was indifferent to weapons [and] trains," Giger writes. "To quell my constant excitement, I masturbated during class. My only interest was eroticism."
When Giger was about 20, a nightmarish suicide wave struck Chur, doubtlessly fueling his increasingly dark works.
Applying ink with a toothbrush and scratching away highlights with a razor blade, he produced, in 1966, A Feast for the Psychiatrist. In the series -- originally done on cardboard, and replicated on aluminum for his current show at the Fuse Gallery -- goggled, gun-toting fetuses are packed into cadaverous wombs; limbless, bound torsos stumble on rickety wheels down endless staircases.
For Giger, these images were also a form of therapy. For example, the "repetitive, mechanical" process of "going up or down a staircase" he said, is "in dream symbols, the same as the erotic act."
He finds the same erotic power, he continued in a voice like a diesel engine sputtering to life, "in the strength [of] the old machines, the locomotives." Hence, the blend of the mechanical and the sexual that would become his signature.
In the same year he painted his Feast, Giger met the woman who would haunt him for years to come: the 18-year-old actress Li Tober.
Like Dali -- whose early work Giger closely mirrors -- Giger would depict his lover over and over again throughout the years. But unlike Dali, who shared nearly 50 years with his Gala, Giger and Li's time together ran less than a decade. After falling into a pit of "lethargy," she committed suicide in 1975.
By then, Giger was on his way to international fame, thanks to his cover for Emerson Lake and Palmer's seminal 1973 LP, Brain Salad Surgery. It would later be named one of the 100 greatest album covers of all time by Rolling Stone. Another piece, Landscape XX, detailing interlocked sets of male and female genitalia, became infamous when the Dead Kennedys included it in their 1985 album, Frankenchrist. The band's lead singer, Jello Biafra, was charged with distributing material harmful to minors because of the painting.
Giger was, at that point, a cult star for crafting perhaps the scariest movie monster of all time, the Alien, for which he won an Oscar in 1980.
After that, thousands of Giger posters began adorning the walls of college dorms. Thousands of his images were etched into fans as tattoos.
Sixteen books of Giger's work were published. And Hollywood liberally borrowed from his imagery, creating the Borg villains of the Star Trek revival series and dystopian world of The Matrix, among others.
There's now a Giger Bar in Giger's hometown of Chur, and a museum in a 400 year-old castle in nearby Gruyeres.
But Giger's ubiquity hasn't translated into recognition from the high art elite. Many echo the feelings of a visitor to the Fuse Gallery opening, who said about Giger's works: "I think D&D [Dungeons and Dragons]. I think high school."
"He's not really on our radar," Carly Berwick, an editor at ArtNews, said. "He's not one of the artists to be discussed on the contemporary scene. That doesn't mean it'll always be that way."
Replied Jim Cowan, who publishes many of Giger's books in the States: "Museums will be fighting over [Giger's] art down the road."
If they're looking for pieces meaningful to Giger, they should go to his Passages series of paintings, in which disembodied vaginas are locked behind powerful, intricate, imposing doors.
These "very much symbolize," Giger said, "back to mother."
He added that the current show -- to which he arrived in a hearse -- lacks such iconic power. But that's hard to believe when looking at the tall silver centerpiece of the Fuse Gallery exhibition, the Nubian Queen.
Elegant in an Egyptianesque headdress, lithe and dangerous with spikes protruding from her bosom, she is half Alien half Giacometti. Sinewy cables run up and down her supermodel legs. An exposed spine ends in a perfect behind.
The blend of sex, power and machinery is all the more poignant because the thin, elegant face of the queen -- which Giger fashioned into a microphone stand for the band Korn -- looks so much like Li, Giger's long-dead lover.
"You get talent," Giger said in a forthcoming documentary, "when you discover the ground of your pain."
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