Take Art: H. R. Giger

I think, probably like a lot of people, I came to Giger through Alien and the amazing creature designs which he did for that movie. How much less of a movie would that have been without the aesthetic that he created? It was a short hop, step, and a jump to the Taschen postcards and a book with a wonderful selection of work from throughout his career, and a posterbook which I decorated the walls of my university lodgings with.

You either love him or you hate him – and it is usually for exactly the same reason that people react so immediately to him – he taps into something primal, something visceral, that is either going to have you nodding or shaking your head. Some people would be confronted with the landscapes made of bodies in various acts of coitus, dead babies, or sexual organs and they would be disgusted; others would be nodding their head and proclaiming how cool they thought it was.

Sometimes Giger, juxtaposed with my Klimt and Schiele pictures, felt like some dark kind of flipside of the psycho-sexual coin; plumbing different areas of the human condition to bring new light to the discussion. They are dark, but they are beautiful – an unsettling marriage of the cold-technological promise of a cybernetic future and the ever-present sexualisation of all surfaces which Giger brings to his work.