Katalog zur Ausstellung „DAIM Retrospective – 35 Years Of Graffiti Art“.
The WAI Woods Art Institute in Wentorf near Hamburg will be showing “Retrospective – 35 Years Of Graffiti Art” from 9 May 2024. It is the most comprehensive exhibition to date of works by the Hamburg graffiti artist Mirko Reisser, also known as DAIM. With more than 80 original works shown in a space of 1,800 square meters, it shows Reisser’s journey from a young graffiti writer to an internationally renowned artist.
In the beginning was the word.
After secretly spray-painting the word “RIGHT” on an electrical distribution box with his friends in the summer of 1989, Reisser went on to develop his own individual style of graffiti writing over the course of the years. He persistently writes his pseudonym DAIM on canvases, in exhibition spaces, and on building facades – even producing the tallest mural in the world in Calgary, Canada, in the year 2022. In the process, Reisser transforms his pseudonym into complex structures and provides the letters with the illusion of corporeality. When he writes the name DAIM today, he follows the blueprint of the letters on the one hand. On the other hand, he deconstructs and reconstructs them until it is hardly possible to recognize the shapes as letters anymore. This is how Mirko Reisser navigates the boundaries between the flat surface and spatiality, between typography and architecture, between legibility and abstraction.
„DAIM Retrospective – 35 Years Of Graffiti Art“
WAI Woods Art Institute
Text: Mathias Becker
Publisher: Double-H Publishing (Hamburg), 2024.
128 pages, 20 x 26 cm.
Language: Englisch / German.
ISBN 978-3-9826259-0-4
