Bierkrieg 1993

H.R. Giger made this beer war...thing, with ink, probably in the early nineties. It's a total, teeming mess of lines, scratchy and intense, kind of like letting your subconscious just barf onto the page. The texture here is all about the density and layering of marks. Look at how he builds up these areas of dark, oppressive tone with just endless cross-hatching. It's like he's creating a whole world out of pure anxiety. Notice how he creates these bizarre mechanical structures, like the train, all these obsessive details, each line a little tic or twitch. The whole image feels like a pressure cooker about to explode. Giger has this way of making the grotesque weirdly seductive. He makes you want to look closer, even when you know you shouldn't. It reminds me a bit of some of Peter Saul's work, that same willingness to go way over the top.