Rarely have artists exerted as much fascination as H.R. Giger, an almost mythological figure of graphic and cinematographic design. A monster—the eponym lead character of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979)—has cast a long shadow on its creator, but this retrospective retrieves H.R. Giger’s work from its claws to showcase a landmark career in popular culture.

The Swiss artist Hans Ruedi Giger (1940-2014) began a dense career in the 1960s during which he built a personal universe nourished by surrealism and esotericism. His world lies on the other side of the mirror, in the caves of madness, places haunted by fascinating shadows and mysterious mechanisms.

Throughout his career as a draughtsman, painter and sculptor, Giger tackled the problems of human beings in the technological age, developing a style that he called biomechanics, playing with the dark symbolism of the fusion of biological and technological worlds.

H.R. Giger is in fact one of the true masters of visionary and fantasy art of the twentieth century and the way popular culture remains enthralled by his work has yet to diminish. But while his work is reinterpreted, it is also ignored and the artist receives little recognition in institutional circles and is significantly absent from art history books. ‘Seul avec la Nuit’ pays homage to a recently deceased artist, and questions the place of his original work in contemporary creation.