At VYRD, the Stuttgart art label, artefacts emerge from possible and impossible realities — alongside small series about a present that seems scarcely more believable.
Stuttgart. You don't recognise VYRD by a style. You recognise it by a suspicion. The paintings, sculptures, photographs and prints of the label VYRD.art — the name doubles as its address on the web — present themselves like pieces of evidence: framed, patinated, bearing traces of a provenance that starts to slip the closer you look. The portrait isn't quite sure of its century. The cabinet card documents an expedition no archive has on record. The framed sheet reports a celestial apparition over Augsburg in 1504 that no chronicle knows of.
VYRD goes back to the Old English wyrd: fate, the workings of destiny. "Artefacts from Altered Realities" is the label's tagline, and it is meant literally.
Apocryphal Art
At the centre are objects that bring their past along with them. Works with a provenance made in-house.
Panel paintings in antique frames whose courtly sitters appear in no ancestral gallery on record: "REGINA Λ ∏ _O", an earthly sovereign whose family tree is not rooted on this planet. "DAUGHTER", teenage daughter of '68-generation vampires — the rebel of a cohort that, even among bloodsuckers, sooner or later turns on its parents. "PAPISSA", a female pope that church history insists never existed. Alongside them, cartes de visite and cabinet cards in full nineteenth-century habit, complete with studio signet and embossed lettering: impossible portraits, photographed in their Sunday best.
How seriously VYRD takes the burden of proof shows in the sculpture "TOYS 'R BRASS", an unruly mass of metal fused from dozens of toy bodies: the rust and verdigris on it are no imitation but real, chemically grown corrosion — ageing in time-lapse. Provenance needs its traces.
The Dark Sister
Romanticism has a dark sister, and at VYRD the two live under one roof. Beauty and terror, longing and loss, nature and threat sit close together. Which is why the uncanny rarely arrives suddenly. It was in the picture all along — seated at the table, standing between the trees, looking back out of an old photograph. The abyss does not cancel the beautiful. It belongs to it.
You only have to look
The strangest reality of all begins — really — right outside the door.
Again and again, VYRD produces small, self-contained series about the now — about conditions that have long been in plain sight and are still overlooked, suppressed or simply accepted.
"Present Tense" is the most recent of them. "NADESCHDA" — named after Pussy Riot co-founder Nadya Tolokonnikova — stands in an orange rain suit in a wasteland of rubble, holding a cardboard sign: "Free Hugs".
In "35°30' N, 19°00' E", titled after the coordinates of the centre of the Mediterranean, the passengers of a capsizing boat watch their own sinking — motionless, as if it concerned someone else.
And "FOLLOWERS: 2M": an influencer, her following packed tight behind her — two million people as the backdrop to a single self.
Its dark twin "FOLLOWERS: 2" takes the word in its older sense: there, at least, you are followed only by your own demons.
Where the core catalogue whispers, Present Tense holds the megaphone.
"New World" is taking shape right now and tells its story in day counts. "DAY 0001": a spacefarer kneeling in awe in the lily pond of a foreign world. "DAY 0028": the same man dissolving into a glowing field of fungi — the suit shed, and the caution with it.
It has to be THERE
Behind the label is the Stuttgart artist Stefan Rienth.
For nearly three decades he ran a design and software agency.
Today he concentrates on VYRD, alongside digital and publishing projects of his own.
Whatever leaves the workshop has to have a body: painting on canvas and wood, works in pigment and charcoal, sculptures and metal objects, printmaking, books and albums — with patinated or sealed surfaces, in old frames and new; as unique works or scarce, numbered editions.
Images now circulate by the billion, weightless; VYRD.art bets on works that are there: with surface, traces, resistance, and a presence a screen can only hint at.
VYRD exhibits and collaborates, but follows the model of an independent label: the works are made in its own studio, released as single pieces or in small series, and available directly through vyrd.art. Dimensions, technique and prices are stated — "price on request" is a rarity at VYRD.
OBSCUR — the magazine
With OBSCUR, an editorial space is growing on vyrd.art for "important trivialities from the margins of attention": for forgotten biographies, odd documents, minor characters and stories that have fallen out of the big picture. Anyone who wants to understand VYRD's imagery will find its hinterland there.
About VYRD
VYRD is the independent art label of Stuttgart artist Stefan Rienth. Under the tagline "Artefacts from Altered Realities", it produces paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, books and albums — as single pieces or in small, limited editions. The catalogue of available works and the magazine OBSCUR live at vyrd.art.
Press contact
VYRD.art · Stefan Rienth
Reinsburgstraße 162 · 70197 Stuttgart
artist@vyrd.art · +49 1525 6164021
vyrd.art
Print-resolution images available on request. Reproduction free of charge; a voucher copy is appreciated.