Following his studies at the fabled Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin between 1971 and 1977, Reinhard Pods received a DAAD scholarship that allowed him to spend 1977 – 78 in New York. 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 like-minded artist friends.
In his sixth decade of painting, Pods continues to push the boundaries of expressive and de-skilled aesthetic forms. Echoing the graffiti-covered U-Bahn carriages and subway cars of Kreuzberg and SoHo in the late 70s and early 80s, Pods introduces figurative and textual fragments in a reflection of the energy and urbanity of his formative years. Refining and advancing his aesthetic language, Pods combines graphic and expressive gestures; squeezing, dripping, and scraping paint directly from the tube in works of astonishing freshness and vitality.
Pods has been the recipient of numerous scholarships and awards including the 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. He lives and works at Wannsee in Berlin.