Swiss surrealist artist HR Giger was catapulted to international fame in 1979 for designing the inimitable creatures and otherworldly environments that terrified moviegoers in Ridley Scott’s science fiction film Alien. Yet before these iconic creations made him a Hollywood celebrity and won him an Academy Award for visual effects, Giger was already highly regarded in the international art world for his unique painting style and biomechanical dreamscapes. HR. Giger—The Oeuvre Before “Alien” is the first book to document the artist’s lesser-known, but no less impressive, early work.

This sumptuously illustrated volume traces Giger’s career from his education as an architect and industrial designer in Zürich to the development of his ink drawing and oil painting technique and his eventual breakthrough as one of the foremost artists of the fantastic realism school. These youthful works formed the groundwork for the artist’s later drawings that earned the esteem of the design industry, the adoration of sci-fi aficionados, and a firm place in the twentieth-century pop culture canon.

Featuring many unpublished or rarely available early paintings and drawings and accompanied by an essay by noted art historian Beat Stutzer, this volume also sets Giger’s paintings side by side with predecessors such as Goya, Ensor, and Piranesi. HR Giger—The Oeuvre  Before “Alien” illuminates the mind of a visual genius whose first artistic experiments were decades before their time.