ART-PRESENTATION: H.R. Giger & Mark Prent-Birth Machine Baby

H. R. Giger and Mark Prent create and inhabit their own worlds, populating them with classic nods to both film and sculptural tradition. Their works are dense and powerful, filled with shocking characters and strange magic. Hans Ruedi Giger is an artist who, more than almost anyone else, has had a far-reaching influence on pop culture and cyberculture. Mark Prent is best known for the graphic realism of his figurative sculpture that have been described as disturbing and even brutal.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

The exhibition “Birth Machine Baby” pairs eerie humanoid figures by H. R. Giger whose name has been cemented in Hollywood history for his visual effects and design work on the Alien film franchise—with sculptures by Mark Prent, an artist whose grotesque and provocative depictions of the human body were greatly admired by Giger himself. Despite the divergences in their chosen styles and mediums, both artists’ interests lie in coaxing out latent fantastical forms from the contours of the human body. Giger’s stylized sculptures merge writhing, skeletal organisms with elegant metallic features, coalescing in his signature “biomechanical” style. Although Giger was best known for designing the iconic extraterrestrial Xenomorph from “Alien” (1979), his other works display the full range of his artistic influences, which span from ancient Egyptian statuary to 20^th Century artists such as Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon. Displaying a mastery of hyperrealistic sculptural techniques, Prent’s uncanny fiberglass and resin sculptures simultaneously shock and enthrall. His art, which has remained fundamentally grounded in the human form since the 1970s, melds familiar anatomies with bizarre, animalistic limbs and features, provoking a visceral process of recognition and emotional connection in the beholder. Prent’s work challenges our understanding of the body as we know it, creating haunting, chimerical hybrids that elicit innovative visual dialogues when juxtaposed with Giger’s biomechanical creations. Hans Rudolf Giger was born in 1940 in Chur, south-eastern Switzerland, the son of a chemist. He showed an early aptitude for art, creating a ghost-ride for friends and neighbours, a corridor of skeletons and monsters made from plaster and cardboard. While his mother encouraged him, his father considered art a “breadless profession” and steered him towards the pharmaceutical business. He moved to Zurich in 1962 to study architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts. His paintings and sculptures were influenced by Ernst Fuchs – as well as Salvador Dali, who he met in 1975 at Cadaqués through his friend, the painter Robert Venosa. “Dali showed a polite interest in my work and introduced his wife Gala, describing her as a specialist in monsters and nightmares whose external appearance completely belied her inner world,” Giger recalled. “Gala then expressed the opinion that I would only need to wear a mask in order to completely match the world of my pictures…” The visit to Dali’s home, and an introduction from Venosa, led to Giger working with Alejandro Jodorowsky on an ill-fated film project, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel “Dune”. That over-ambitious production would have featured set designs from Dali and Giger, music from Pink Floyd and a cast including Gloria Swanson and Orson Welles, but the money ran out. When the film was finally made in 1984 by David Lynch only a few fragments of Giger’s ideas remained. His work with Jodorowsky did however, bring Giger to the attention of Ridley Scott, who was in the process of designing “Alien” (1979), , in which the spaceship Nostromo lands on a planetoid and the crew find a chamber containing alien eggs, from one of which a creature hatches and escapes into the ship. In an era before the widespread adoption of CGI the design work was done with paintings, drawings and three-dimensional models. Giger’s concept for the eponymous monster was based on his 1976 painting “Necronom IV” which Scott had seen.  Although he worked as a designer on one of the sequels, “Alien 3” (1992), Giger become disillusioned with the industry, saying. “My design was adopted and modified. The film business is a gangster business.” In 1998 Giger acquired the Chateau St Germain in Gruyères in the Fribourg region of Switzerland. He had previously had an exhibition in the town in 1990 and had fallen in love with the area. The building, now managed by his second wife, Carmen Maria Scheifele-Giger, houses the largest collection of his work in the world, including many designs which were used on Alien. Even the bar of this museum reflects the artist’s aesthetic, with an arched, biomechanical-styled roof, walls and fittings. As well as his work on film, Giger also designed album covers for a number of artists including Emerson, Lake and Palmer (his cover for their “Brain Salad Surgery” (1973) fuses a machine with a human skull and “Koo Koo” (1981) by Debbie Harry. Mark Prent’s sculpture and environmental installations have always garnered attention. The artist’s extreme and unapologetic work calls out the cruelty and horror that life lived often engenders. Prent “approaches his work with the perspective of environmental and social justice”, recognizing that art is one place for these things to be played out: targeting them and safely, hopefully, identifying and extracting them from life lived. Mark Prent was born in Lodz, Poland in 1947 and having had many of his family killed in concentration camps during the war, immigrated to Canada with his parents the following year.  In 1972, and again in 1974, the police attempted unsuccessfully to close exhibitions of Mark Prent’s art at Toronto’s Isaacs Gallery. The art dealer, Avrom Isaacs, was charged with “knowingly exhibiting to public view, a disgusting object” under the auspices of an obscure 19th Century Canadian law originally intended to shutter circus sideshows. The Edmund Burke Society, a right wing Canadian populist organization similar to The John Birch Society in the United States, instigated these attempts at censorship. The actions generated a great deal of publicity, but ultimately came to naught. Still, they raised significant issues concerning freedom of expression and resulted in much debate about changes to existing law. Prent’s case became a cause célèbre inspiring Joseph Green, the director of York University’s theatre and art program, to restage Prent’s 1974 exhibition at the University’s Fine Arts building which became a backdrop for a conference on censorship in the arts, with Edward Keinholz as the keynote speaker. The following year, on Kienholz’s recommendation, Prent received a DAAD grant, and spent the next two years living and working in Berlin. In 1987, Louise Dompierre, the chief curator of Toronto’s premier alternative art venue, The Power Plant, asked filmmaker David Cronenberg and Mark Pent to show together. The two gladly agreed and “Prent/Cronenberg: Crimes Against Nature” was the result. Then, in the exhibition “Through the Eye” in 2013 at Toronto’s Museum of Contemprary Art, Prent’s work  was included along with that of Louise Bourgeois, William S. Burroughs, Alex Colville and Andy Warhol.

Info: Curator: Harmony Korine, Gagosian Gallery, 821 Park Avenue, New York, Duration: 5/11-21/12/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com