HR Giger was a painter, sculptor and designer known as the ‘father’  of Xenomorph – the protagonist monster in Ridley Scott’s 1979 film  ‘Alien’. The Schinkel Pavillon exhibition not only showcases the  artist’s iconic works that led to the creation of the Alien protagonist,  but also repositions Giger as a late surrealist. It presents the  artist’s influential Gesamtkunstwerk – his early surrealist oil  paintings, ink drawings, sculptures, as well as previously unexhibited  private diaries – highlighting the age-defying Freudian horror and  societal fears so deeply implanted in his work. Giger’s universe is paired with that of Mire Lee, who has recently  become known for her kinetic sculptures and quasi-alchemical  installations. Newly commissioned, complex arrangements and structures  made of silicone, PVC, tubes, machinery, metal and concrete weave around  the Schinkel Pavillion, evoking dysfunctional organisms, dissected body  parts, fleshy limbs or intestines. Sexuality, corporeality and  technology are glued together in her work, as her simultaneously  seductive and repulsive forms turn and crawl in viscous fluids. The HR Giger & Mire Lee exhibition turns Schinkel  Pavillon’s main octagon-shaped space into a womb-like cell. It is  proliferated by Giger’s visions of grotesque, mutant-like figures that  reflect his angst concerning the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, and  his uncanny explorations of prenatal psychology. Lee’s Carriers – offsprings  (2021) are suspended from the ceiling – these bulbous multi-limbed  creatures are fed with viscous liquids pumped through motor-driven  tubes, reminiscent of umbilical cords, that occasionally squirt. Like  bodies or beings in various states of fullness and hollowness, growth  and decline, Carriers – offsprings manifest Lee’s explorations  of extremes, as well as the fetish of ‘Vorarephelia’– the yearning to  completely absorb a living being, or to be consumed by it, or even a  return to the mother’s womb. The lower level of Schinkel Pavillon presents a demonic and violently sexy love story centred around a dialogue between Giger’s Necronom (Alien) (1990) and Lee’s new animatronic sculpture Endless House (2021). Some of Giger’s key airbrush paintings, including the most iconic, Necronom IV (1976),  as well as sketches for ‘Alien’, diaries and erotic drawings, provide a  more intimate insight into the artist’s dark imagination; while another  new sculpture by Lee spins on the floor distressingly, in endless  loops. Both Giger’s and Lee’s ‘organisms’ are phantasmagorias of humans and  machines forming an indissoluble whole and constantly shifting between  the stages of decline and resilience, lust and revulsion, hopelessness  and power – thus emblematic of the polarities of our own existence.  Abstraction, figuration, organic, apparatus, birth, eroticism, violence  and death coalesce into a cycle of constant metamorphosis. Curated by Agnes Gryczkowska
Assistant Curator: Hendrike Nagel