Quick Read: HR Giger NY City

The master of biomechanoids comes to America in HR Giger NY City. Published by Kaleidoscope, this art book is available from Phantasmic. We took a look inside Giger's unique travelogue in 1970s New York. Transcript of the video is below.

Hello, this is Renzo with Phantasmic and today we're taking a look at the art book HR Giger NY City. This was originally published in 1981 shortly after the release of Alien and this is a new facsimile edition which is really great because the original art book has been out of print for a long time and it goes for a pretty hefty price.

As you can tell from the title, this book is about Giger's time in New York City.  shortly before Alien in around 1977 and then again after the release of Alien in the 1980s. This book is also very much about his evolution as an artist. When we think of Giger we think of his bio-mechanical art and we see how he gets that across with these very like rigid shapes and achieves this sort of combination of organic and rigidity by utilizing stencils, which is detailed in the introduction. Giger has done it using die-cut pieces of metal that were intended for circuit boards, sometimes it's cake doilies or pieces of cardboard and all that like goes into his artistic process done through airbrush

Another interesting thing about these paintings is that he did no preliminary sketches for any of these. All of these were just straight airbrushed right onto the canvas. This book is both an exhibition of Giger's artwork but it's also a little bit of a scrapbook and travelog. This is Giger's perspective of 1970s to early 80s “Bronx is burning” New York, which was a very different time. I mean New York sucks in many ways now, but it sucked in different ways back. That that's the short version. There's some great shots here of Giger with Debbie Harry as well as at the Oscar party for Alien.

We don't usually think of Giger as a landscape artist but that's very much what this book is about. There are journal entries from Giger himself and some of his associates talking about their time in New York and meeting cab drivers; what it was like going through Central Park seeing Eraserhead, and brown-bagging it on the airplane ride over. It gives the book kind of a more intimate feel and with the addition of these photographs it's like somewhere between an art book and a scrapbook. It gives you a very close feel to Giger that you don't ordinarily get from just a straightforward art book. Thanks to the large format of the book you really get a very up-close look at his artwork. You really get to take in the details because of the size.

This book is in the Phantasmic store. Check it out while you can because supplies are limited.

Thank you for watching!