164 - GIGER, Hans Ruedi. N.Y. CITY.

GIGER, Hans Ruedi. N.Y. CITY. First French edition of this album featuring 28 paintings by the creator of *Alien*, offering a nightmarish and surreal vision of New York. A beautiful copy signed by the artist. Paris, Éditions Baal, 1981. Folio size, illustrated publisher’s hardcover. 46 pages, 28 compositions by Giger reproduced in full color on full and double pages, 42 black-and-white photographs in the text. Printed in 2 or 3 columns. Minor scratches on the cover. First French edition of this album conceived by the creator of *Alien*, presenting his unique vision of New York through 28 paintings created with an airbrush, using India ink and acrylics, and enhanced with stencils. One of 220 numbered copies (No. 145), signed by the artist. Blending the suffocating architecture of Manhattan’s skyscrapers with dark organic forms, giant metallic cockroaches, and subway trains resembling burrowing worms, the work as a whole presents a surreal and nightmarish image of the city, which the artist regarded as a “soulless machine,” a metallic petrification, a negative utopia. These large-scale compositions are complemented by 42 photographs of the artist, taken in various settings during his stays in New York. The album contains a foreword by psychologist and “LSD guru” Timothy Leary, a legendary figure of American counterculture, as well as texts by Hans Ruedi Giger, Fritz Billeter, Andrea Melchior, and Mia Giger, translated by Richard Keller, Bijan Aalam, and Jenny Zauberman. Hans Ruedi Giger, better known as H.R. Giger (1940–2014), was a Swiss visual artist, graphic artist, illustrator, sculptor, and designer. He is world-renowned for creating the biomechanical style, a dark artistic universe that intimately fuses human flesh and machinery. His most famous contribution remains his design of the creature and sets for the science fiction film *Alien* (1979), for which he won an Oscar in 1980. In excellent condition.