DARE

“For me, writing is an expression of personality. Letters are therefore not just a way of communicating content but also reflect the soul of each writer and that is what I do, I ‘write’. My artistic origins lie in ‘writing’, in our society known as ‘graffiti’. For over 20 years, I have actively and intensively grappled with the idea of letters; I have studied these in their basic typographical forms and as autodidact further developed them. The name ‘Dare’ is the pseudonym that I adopted in 1986. After the many years when I wrote my name on walls all over the world, it seemed to me most honest to continue to write this name on canvas today. My paintings should be regarded as written self-portraits and if you believe that writing is an expression of personality, life can be found in each individual character. This life, in turn, is me DARE! or Sigi von Koeding.” (Sigi ‘Dare’ von Koeding, artist statement)