Hans Rudolf "Ruedi" Giger ( 1940 – 2014) was a Swiss surrealist painter, whose style was adapted for many forms of media, including record-albums, furniture and tattoo-art.
"H.R. Giger was a Swiss artist and designer known for his nightmarish science-fiction motifs. Giger is best known for his book Necronomicon (1977), as well as his design work for Ridley Scott’s 1979 feature film Alien. “Some people say my work is often depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood, overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don't really think it is,” he once said. Born Hans Ruedi Giger on February 5, 1940 in Chur, Switzerland, he went on to study architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts in Zürich. His first successful attempt at reaching audiences with visual art came in 1969, when a painting of his was published as a poster. Giger cited Ernst Fuchs and Salvador Dalí as major influences on his stylizations of bodies and machinery. Before becoming involved in the production of Alien, Giger was recruited by the avant-garde director Alejandro Jodorowsky to be a designer for his unproduced film version of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965). Though the film was never completed, it gave Giger a chance to produce a number of intricate objects and artworks based on the novel’s themes and characters. Over the decades that followed, he continued producing work for films, music videos, album covers, and videogames. Giger died on May 12, 2014 in Zürich, Switzerland. Today, much of his work is housed in the H.R. Giger Museum in Gruyères, Switzerland."(artnet)
