The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – ARh+ by H.R. Giger

In ARh+, Hans Ruedi Giger, the late Swiss surrealist and visionary designer, delivers a visceral autopsy of the human psyche through one of the most unflinchingly intimate portfolios of his career. Less a book than an arcane grimoire, ARh+collects artworks, diary fragments, photographs, and design sketches that together form a blood-soaked fingerprint of a singularly uncompromising imagination. It is a dark testament—at once confession, ritual, and memorial.

Published in the twilight of his life, ARh+ transcends conventional categorization. Though often dubbed a “coffin table book” in a morbid nod to its aesthetic, Giger’s work operates more like an alchemical mirror: it reflects not only the artist’s private mythologies but also the collective nightmares of an industrialized, post-human civilization. In this sense, ARh+ can be situated within the lineage of gothic modernism, but with a biomechanical twist unique to Giger. If Mary Shelley gave birth to the modern Prometheus, Giger dissected its metallic ribcage and fashioned it into an erotic reliquary.

The title ARh+ is not merely a blood type—it is a cipher. The A, perhaps for “artist” or “alien”; Rh+, the common blood factor, signaling a cruel irony: even as Giger’s aesthetic seems inhuman, he remains stubbornly flesh-bound. In this liminal zone—between steel and skin, dream and waking, art and artifact—Giger thrives. His subjects, frequently female, frequently deconstructed, and always entangled with mechanical tendrils, are rendered with almost religious detail. Here, the erotic and the industrial become indistinguishable. Giger is no mere fantasist; he is a theologian of the obscene.

What separates ARh+ from earlier compilations, such as Necronomicon or Biomechanics, is its overt autobiographical tenor. The diary pages are both banal and harrowing, recounting personal loss, professional triumphs, and his continued engagement with mortality as muse. Especially poignant is the artist’s recounting of the suicide of his lover, actress Li Tobler, which haunts the margins of the book like a specter. Her presence is not just thematic—it is elemental, appearing in images, inscriptions, and the melancholic tone that underlies even the most grotesque of Giger’s creations.

One might argue that Giger’s work is alienating—intentionally so. The figures here are not meant to comfort or even to be understood through conventional aesthetics. They exist as exhumations of subconscious terror, born of Freud’s “uncanny” and Bataille’s erotics of death. In this way, ARh+ functions not only as a retrospective but as a manifesto of sorts—a declaration that the grotesque has a sacred place in art, and that horror, in its most intimate form, is also a kind of truth.

The physical design of the book furthers this ethos: large, heavy, and printed with near-fetishistic precision. One does not read ARh+ so much as endure it. It demands both reverence and fortitude.

ARh+ is not for the faint of heart, nor the casually curious. It is a monumental closing statement from an artist who defied the boundaries of medium, morality, and mortality. For those willing to enter its cathedral of the abject, Giger offers not answers, but communion: a baptism in chrome, bone, and shadow.