Swiss surrealist artist HR Giger (1940-2014) achieved international fame in 1979 for designing the fantastic creatures and eerie environments that terrified moviegoers in Ridley Scott's science fiction film Alien.

Swiss surrealist artist HR Giger (1940-2014) achieved international fame in 1979 for designing the fantastic creatures and eerie environments that terrified moviegoers in Ridley Scott's science fiction film Alien.

Yet before these iconic creations made him a celebrity and won him an Oscar for visual effects, Giger was already highly regarded in the international art world for his unique freehand painting style and biomechanical dreamscapes.

HR Giger: The Oeuvre Before Alien 1961-1976, first published in 2007 and now becoming available again in a new edition, is the only book to date to document the artist's lesser known, but no less impressive, early work.

This lavishly illustrated volume traces Giger's career from his education as an architect and industrial designer at the Zurich College of Art 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.