Dare, born Siegfried von Koeding was a Swiss graffiti artist and curator.
Life and Work
Dare was born in Basel, Switzerland, to Swiss author Yvette Amman and the German Rolf Kurt von Koeding. He began writing in 1986. Using the pseudonym Dare he started his art career in 1990, making easel paintings. After his first contract for the photographer Onorio Mansutti and a large wall installation for the district of Münchenstein there followed works such as a stage design for the Bejart Ballet in Lausanne and painting the theatre tram for Migros-North-West Switzerland, with his first international press reports accompanied by television appearances and reports on Swiss television. This was followed by commissions for the design of facades, walls and shops in Los Angeles, New York City, and Hamburg, and life-paintings with other artists in Paris, Barcelona, Zagreb and Naestved. At the graffiti exhibition "Concrete or Wallpapers" 2001 in the Swiss embassy in London, Dare met Banksy, who invited him to the exhibition "Urban Discipline" in Hamburg. The industrialist and photographer Gunter Sachs commissioned a large interior work of more than 200 square metres in his apartment in Schloss Velden on the Wörthersee. Gunter Sachs photographed this for Architectural Digest, graffiti as an art form became "salonfähig". At the International Watch and Jewelry Exhibition Baselworld 2007, Pierre DeRoche presented a limited edition of 11 watches with faces by Dare with a "Spray-Happening" in the presence of the artist. The Fine Arts Museum in Leipzig showed some of Dare's pictures in the exhibition "Art is Feminine". In SFR1 on 15 April 2009 Sigi von Koeding told the Swiss TVtalk show host Kurt Aeschbacher about his career stretching from illegal writer to internationally recognised artist. Dare died from a brain tumour less than a year later, on 6 March 2010, and was buried in the graveyard Friedhof am Hörnli in Basel. DARE's work for Sachs was posthumously rated by the Financial Times as one of the best examples of interior graffiti". On the 6th anniversary of Dare's death, in 2016, an exhibition of his work was shown in the Basilea Foundation in Basel.
Artist's statement
"Script is for me an expression of personality, in that letters do not only serve to communicate subject matter, but are also a mirror of the writer. And that is what I do, I write. My artistic roots lie in Writing, which is known in our society as Graffiti. For more than 20 years I have been dealing intensively and actively with writing, I have learnt its basic typographical form and developed it further on my own. The name DARE stands for a pseudonym which I gave myself in 1986. After all these years in which I have written my name on the walls of the world it is for me a matter of honesty to write this name on canvas. My pictures are thus to be seen as written self-portraits, and if one believes that handwriting is an expression of personality, then life can be found in every letter. Conversely stated, this is me. DARE!"
