‘HR Giger & Mire Lee’ exhibition I curated at @schinkelpavillon is extended until the 16th of January.🖤🖤🖤 The main gallery space is transformed into a womb-like cell. 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 are paired with Lee’s ‘Carriers – offsprings’ (2021). Lee’s bulbous, multi-limbed creatures are suspended from the ceiling and fed with viscous fluids pumped through motor-driven tubes, reminiscent of umbilical cords, that occasionally squirt. Like bodies or beings in various states of fullness and emptiness, growth and decline, ‘Carriers – offsprings’ manifest the artist’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, so that both subjects return to a state of prenatal unity. ‘Harkonnen Environment’ (1981)–the table and chairs set–was created by Giger for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unrealised film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel ‘Dune’. Giger was asked to create an image of the story’s villain–Baron Harkonnen, his home planet and his castle. Harkonnen is a story of a civilisation that engulfs its inmates before swallowing and digesting them. In the middle of the table rests Lee’s new sculpture ‘Endless House: Large Egg’ (2021). With its fleshy, ‘ripe’ insides placed on a dining table, it alludes – similarly to ‘Carriers’ and the ‘Harkonnen Environment’ – to a gory consumption of a fleshy living thing. The sculpture features a harder shell of concrete housing soft, vulnerable insides. The work is inspired by the story of a hentai artist, Crimson, who tells the tale of a being whose skin becomes rough with clitoris-like hyper- sensitivity, as if the insides were laid bare onto the outside. Giger’s two rarely exhibited oil paintings ‘Hommage à S. Beckett II’ and III (both 1968) depict erotically charged scenes featuring part-organic, part-industrial beings trapped in positions. They echo characters imagined by Samuel Beckett – limbless, blind, and awaiting an unspecified ‘end’. 📷 Frank Sperling Retouching @rgberlin