“In its initial form, a lot of the 1960s stuff was innovative and exciting… Soon you had endless solos that went nowhere. By 1973, I knew that what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no bullshit rock ‘n’ roll.”

Tommy Ramone*

Ramone’s words encapsulate a generational rejection of the romantic idealism and technical mastery of stadium rock in the mid-1970s, and capture the emerging spirit of the New Wave in music and painting where directness of expression, rawness of conveyance, and snarling sentiment were valued at the expense of virtuosity, concept, and craft. This new painting scene was emerging concurrently in both New York City and in West Berlin in the mid-1970s, where the painter Reinhard Pods was born in Kreuzberg in 1951.

Pods attended the Academy of Fine Arts in West Berlin from 1971-77, before arriving in New York on a one-year DAAD scholarship. 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. He hoped to remain in New York City but could not and returned to West Berlin in 1978, settling on the border of Neukölln and Kreuzberg where the new wave and punk scene converged around the new SO36 music club and performance space. He, Albert Oehlen, and Martin Kippenberger (amongst countless others) found community at SO36 and at alternate spaces like Galerie am Moritzplatz and 1/61, which Pods co-founded with artist friends in 1979.

Though Leftist, they were largely indifferent to WWII history and dismissed the cold-war aesthetic schism between East German realism and West German abstraction. The adopted a de-skilled methodology built on German Expressionist practice and Dada philosophies from the early 20^th Century that ridiculed and discarded Minimalism and Conceptualism, and developed a ‘bad-boy’ ethos that echoed the graffiti covered U-Bahn carriages and broken pavements of Kreuzberg of the late 70s. Concurrently in New York City, painters such as Joyce Pensato, Julian Schnabel, Christopher Wool, Donald Baechler, and Jean-Michel Basquiat also turned skeptically against the art of the 1960s to establish a new ‘urban expressionism’ that represented the convergence of the subversive sincerity of New Wave music and graffiti with a reappraisal of Abstract Expressionist traditions and The Beats.

Pods’ developed a style of painting that is resolutely ahistorical and occupied the here and now. Jetzt (Now),1979 is a rhombus shaped canvas aggressively and rapidly painted in acrylic with a house painters brush in tones of gray, white, and pink; supplemented ironically with a cigarette butt and studio detritus, with the the word ‘Jetzt’ appearing almost quasi-assertively amidst the abstract strokes and painterly drips. Pods’ painted words would scream and snarl more clearly from 1980 onward, where finger painted incisions in grey and yellow in Mist, 1980-2014; and blunt spray-painted tags in je t’aime malen, 1981 and Untitled, 1983 float amidst and above the romantic remains of old-school push-pull loops and zig-zags strokes in an energetic palette of pinks, yellows, and blues. He delved further into his mash-up of low to high and high to low, by appropriating and adding stenciled Lichtensteinesque brushstrokes to his abstractions and texts in 1982, alongside Polaroid photographs of the everyday and torn and over-painted reproductions of classical paintings in Untitled, 1986.

Pods’ work was greeted with critical appreciation, sales and artist residencies. His first solo exhibition too place at his 1/61 space in 1979 and was followed by a further solo exhibition at the Forum für aktuelle Kunst, Berlin in 1980. In 1981 he was included in Ten Young Painters from Berlin at the Goethe Institute in London; Situation Berlin at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Nice, along with museum exhibitions in Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Berlin. 1983 proved to be a pivotal year as he settled in Italy and held solo exhibitions in West Berlin and Livorno, just as a seismic geographical recentering of the German art scene was occurring.

Pods returned to Kreuzberg in West Berlin in 1988 and exhibited with little success at Galerie Herzer in Munich in 1990 and Galerie Michael Haas in Berlin in 1993. In 1996 he moved to rural Berlin suburb of Kladow and entered the treacherous period of mid-career anonymity that often envelopes all but the brightest and loudest artists, without any recognized gallery representation. Pods next solo exhibition was hosted by Michael Haas in Berlin in 2018, and twenty-five years had passed between solo exhibitions, during which Pods was almost completely detached from the new Berlin art scene.

Amidst the silence Pods continued to paint guided by his own internal artistic monologue and his highly evolved aesthetic instinct. He has persisted in working on ambitiously scaled canvases and his resolute touch in Lichtjan, 1991, and Untitled, 2001, exhibit an assuredness and confidence despite the indifference of the outside world. 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 will turn 72 years old this year.

Amidst the silence Pods continued to paint guided by his own internal artistic monologue and his highly evolved aesthetic instinct. He has persisted in working on ambitiously scaled canvases and his resolute touch in Lichtjan, 1991, and Untitled, 2001, exhibit an assuredness and confidence despite the indifference of the outside world. 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 will turn 72 years old this year.

Welcome back to New York City Reinhard!

*Tommy Ramone, Fight Club, Uncut Magazine, January 2007.