Reinhard Pods:
A Sort of Homecoming
Paintings 1979 – 2022

About the Artist

Following his studies at the fabled Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin between 1971 – 1977, Reinhard Pods (b. 1951, Berlin) received a DAAD scholarship that allowed him to spend 12 months in New York between 1977-78. While in the U.S. Pods embraced everything the then gritty city had to offer. He lived in a loft on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy, made paintings, visited galleries, and hung-out at CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, seeing the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads. Returning to Germany in 1978 he settled on the border of Neukölln and Kreuzberg, where Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave) converged around the SO36 music club and performance space, along with alternate spaces like Galerie am Moritzplatz and gallery 1/61, which Pods co-founded with a group of likeminded artist friends.  

The paintings selected for the exhibition reflect the energy and urbanity of Pods’ visit to New York as well as his formative years in Berlin. Jetzt (Now), 1979 is a rhombus shaped canvas aggressively and rapidly painted in acrylic with a house painter’s brush in tones of gray, white, and pink; supplemented ironically with a cigarette butt and studio detritus, with the word Jetzt appearing almost quasiassertively amidst the abstract strokes and painterly drips.

More recent paintings including Licht Jain, 1991, and Untitled (Willkürlich), 2001, exhibit an assuredness and confidence and in the last decade. Pods has continued to refine and advance his own aesthetic language, bringing in more figurative references and playing with words; squeezing paint directly from the tube onto spare conceived canvases that present an astonishing freshness and vitality, such as his Untitled paintings of 2022.

Pods has continued to refine and advance his own aesthetic language, bringing in more figurative references and playing with words; squeezing paint directly from the tube onto spare conceived canvases that present an astonishing freshness and vitality, such as his Untitled paintings of 2022.

Pods has been the recipient of numerous scholarships and awards including Villa Romana Prize (1980) the Villa Massimo Prize (1988) the Will Grohmann Prize (1994) and the Fred Thieler Prize of the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (1996 ). 

Reinhard Pods has exhibited extensively in Europe since the mid-1970s. He withdrew from the public eye in the mid-1990s, returning recently for acclaimed exhibitions at Galerie Michael Haas in Berlin and Zürich in 2018 and 2012.