The paintings of the Berlin artist Reinhard Pods are gestural abstract; layers of paint in intense colours, scribbled lines smeared into streaks, enigmatic graffiti writings and deformed bodies in large format are staggered against dense spaces. In terms of motifs, the works can be associated with the late gestural abstract expressionism propagated by Willem de Kooning or Cy Twombly. Pods is part of the Berlin generation of artists that included Elvira Bach, Luciano Castelli, Rainer Fetting and Salomé.
From 1971 to 1977, he studied at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin and was a master student of Karl Horst Hödicke. He then worked in New York thanks to a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship. In 1979, together with Frank Dornseif, ter Hell and Elke Lixfeld, he founded the group and the Self-Help Gallery 1/61. In contrast to the neo-expressive painting of the Galerie am Moritzplatz, this group worked conceptually. The series of exhibitions by the 1/61 artists began in July 1979 with a group show, followed by solo exhibitions and a joint show during the Berlin Art Days in 1980.
During this period Pods was awarded the Villa Romana Prize, combined with a working scholarship to Florence. In 1988 he returned to Italy thanks to the Villa Massimo Prize. In addition to scholarships, Reinhard Pods received the award of the Kunstfonds, Bonn (1986), the Will Grohmann Prize (1994) and the Fred Thieler Prize of the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (1996). He lives at Wannsee in Berlin.