Hans Rudolf 'Ruedi' Giger is a Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer, who
won an Academy Award for Best Achievement for Visual Effects for his design work on the
film Alien.
Giger was born in 1940 in Chur, Switzerland, the son of a chemist. In 1962, he moved to
Zurich, where he studied interior and industrial design at the School of Commercial Art
until 1970. Giger had a relationship with Swiss actress Li Tobler until she committed
suicide in 1975. He married Mia Bonzanigo in 1979; they split one and a half years later.
Giger's style and thematic execution have been influential. His design for the Alien
was inspired by his painting Necronom IV and earned him an Oscar in 1980. His books of
paintings, particularly Necronomicon and Necronomicon II (1985) and the frequent
appearance of his art in Omni magazine continued his rise to international prominence.
Giger is also well known for artwork on several records, most notibly was Copies of
Giger's Work 219: Landscape XX, better known as Penis Landscape, were included in an
insert with the Dead Kennedys album Frankenchrist and became the centerpiece of a 1986
obscenity lawsuit against Eric Reed Boucher, a.k.a. Jello Biafra, the vocalist and songwriter for the band.
In 1998 Giger acquired the Château St. Germain in Gruyères, Switzerland, and it now
houses the H. R. Giger Museum, a permanent repository of his work
Giger got his start with small ink drawings before progressing to oil paintings. For
most of his career, Giger has worked predominantly in airbrush, creating monochromatic
canvasses depicting surreal, nightmarish dreamscapes. However, he has now largely
abandoned large airbrush works in favor of works with pastels, markers or ink.
His most distinctive stylistic innovation is that of a representation of human bodies
and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, described as "biomechanical". His
paintings often display fetishistic sexual imagery. 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. Giger is perhaps
the best-known sufferer of night terrors and his paintings are all to some extent
inspired by his experiences with that particular sleep disorder. He studied interior and
industrial design at the School of Commercial Art in Zurich (from 1962 to 1970) and made
his first paintings as a means of art therapy
www.hrgiger.com/ 
