HR Giger: The Early Years

Tells the story of HR Giger’s childhood and youth in the Swiss town of Chur.

HR Giger (1940-2014) is one of the outstanding figures in Swiss art and design history, celebrated around the world for his design of the fantastic creatures and eerie environments that terrified moviegoers in Ridley Scott’s 1979 science fiction film Alien. Yet very little is known about his childhood and youth in Giger’s native town of Chur. A trove of photographs, drawings by the young boy Hansruedi, and early artworks that already reveal the future of HR Giger’s artistic force, recently unearthed in the Giger family’s former holiday home in the Grisons, now offer intimate insights into his early years until the early 1960s.

Richly illustrated with more than 230 images from that collection, HR Giger: The Early Years tells the story of those two decades until Giger decided to move to Zurich and train as an architect and designer in 1962, for the first time. Supplemented by brief texts as well as by statements from his schoolmates, friends, and others, these images form a lively picture of that period: family episodes; the Mickey Mouse adaptations Giger created at the age of ten; his growing love of jazz music, photography, and weapons; the trips around Europe he took together with his friends; and the youth culture of Chur of the 1950s and 1960s that shaped him. The volume will appeal to any fan of the extraordinary art and the fascinating personality of HR Giger.

Charly Bieler is a journalist and writer based in Chur, Switzerland.