Fergus McCaffrey, New York is excited to present an exhibition of new paintings by Reinhard Pods (b. 1951, Berlin). This exhibition follows his acclaimed 2023 exhibition which showcased Pods’ work for the first time since his DAAD Fellowship in New York in 1977-78.

Pods attended the Academy of Fine Arts in West Berlin from 1971-77, before arriving in New York, where he lived in a loft on Elizabeth Street, made paintings and hung-out at CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City seeing the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads. He returned to West Berlin in 1978 and settled on the border of Neu Köln and Kreuzberg where the new wave and punk scene converged around the new SO36 club and performance space that had just opened.

Pods’ is part of a generation of German and American artists like Albert Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger, Joyce Pensato, Donald Baechler, and Jean-Michel Basquiat who adopted an expressive and de-skilled means of painting, which discarded conceptualism and minimalism, and echoed the graffiti covered U-Bahn carriages and subway cars of Kreuzberg and SoHo in the late 70s and early 80s. Their art helped to define a new ‘urban expressionism’ that was a convergence of Street Art, Pop and Abstract Expressionism.

Now in his sixth decade of painting and having experienced decades of anonymity, Pods’ new paintings exhibit a freedom and fluidity of expressive power that demonstrates a directness and confidence that comes with years of isolated study. The artist’s painterly language remains largely abstract, and exhibits the same dynamic roughness, tangible immediacy, and breathless self-assurance of earlier work; married to a new palette of pastel-infused oil paint, watercolor, and spray-paint.