H.R. Giger was born Hans Ruedi Giger on 5 February 1940 in Chur, a town in the Swiss Canton of the Grisons. He was the son of a pharmacist and he had a happy, peaceful childhood, as he acknowledged himself. Nonetheless, as someone who was born at the height of the Second World War, ever since he was a young boy Giger felt a sense of anxiety that never left him. As he stated:“What I can still remember today is the collective fear that prevailed at the time… and that you couldn’t get your head around as a child. That was the worst thing. Feeling that something wasn’t right, but not knowing what it was.”
The young Hans Ruedi spent his days in the family pharmacy, looking at bottles of strangely coloured liquids and leeches, which were still used for medicinal purposes at the time. He had a growing fascination with the macabre, which reached a whole new level when his father gave him a human skull that he had been sent by a pharmaceutical company. The five-year-old Giger was mesmerized by it. He tied it to a piece of string and he used to take it for walks, dragging it along behind him.
Giger was also enthralled by the Egyptian mummies in the local museum, the Rätisches Museum, where he went for the first time with his sister. Instead of going to church, Hans Ruedi preferred to spend his Sundays in the museum. There was always a woman there waiting for him: a mummified Egyptian princess alongside whom the young Giger liked to sit, horrified yet captivated at the same time.
This goes to show that right from the days of Giger’s childhood, horror went hand in hand with beauty and elegance in his eyes. They were indissolubly linked and all equally important. Everything dark, odd and sombre was irresistibly alluring and evocatively inspirational to him.
Although he had shown an artistic spirit from a young age, Giger’s father never looked favourably on his predilection for such things and made him pursue education and training of a more vocational nature. Having struggled at high school, after he finished his secondary education Hans Ruedi did an apprenticeship as a draughtsman and then studied interior design at a School of Applied Arts. Although he never worked in the field, the course made a crucial contribution to the development of his personal sense of aesthetics and the industrial style that was a distinctive featureof many of his creations.
As well as helping him to improve and polish his technical skills and his precision in the portrayal of mechanical and robotic details, Hans Ruedi’s time at the School of Industrial Design and Applied Arts in Zurich opened up new horizons for him. He discovered Sigmund Freud and started keeping a diary in which he described all of his dreams, including the most disturbing ones that plagued his nights. H.R. Giger began to make a name for himself in the world of independent art, largely thanks to the early album covers that he produced for the underground counterculture.
After he finished his education, acrylic painting and airbrushing became Giger’s hallmarks. In the following years, he displayed his works in a number of exhibitions and expanded his range of technical skills to include the use of ink. Only later would he progress to oil painting.