Reinhard Pods Works 1976 - 2021   

Galerie Haas Zurich is pleased to announce the  exhibition Works 1976 - 2021 by Reinhard Pods.  

The exhibition runs from May 31 to July 24, 2021. It is the first solo presentation of the German painter  (*1951) at the Galerie Haas Zurich.    

Reinhard Pods grew up in the bygone reality of West  Berlin, in an exclave under the administration of three  occupying powers. Far away from the artistic epicenters  of Frankfurt, Cologne and Düsseldorf, he knew early  on that he wanted to become an artist and enrolled  at the Hochschule der Künste (now the Berlin University of the Arts [UdK]) at the age of twenty. 

As a master  student of Karl Horst Hödicke, Hödicke was initially  Pods' artistic compass, but after winning the DAAD scholarship in 1977, he moved to New York for a year, where he not only saw the works of American masters of Abstract Expressionism in person for the first time, but also immersed himself in Conceptual Art. 

As a result, Pods discarded his previous painting, which had been defined by representationalism, in order “to approach his work in a more gestural and intuitive manner. This went as far as a frenzied state, in which one layer of paint followed another, reworked wet-on-wet in rapid succession. Leaving behind the solipsistic claims of figurative painting, Pods established a contemporary connection to the energy of Jackson Pollock, only to sever it again in the next step. He lived out Hödicke’s As-Well-As by painting both abstractly and representationally and, additionally, by employing language as a purely Dadaistic element.”[1]    

The virtuoso As-Well-As runs like a red thread through Pod's oeuvre and to this day the exploratory approach to painting determines his work. Pods has received numerous awards: in 1980 he won the Villa Romana Prize in Florence, in 1988 the Villa Massimo Prize in Rome, in 1994 the Will Grohmann and in 1996 the Fred Thieler Prize. 

Reinhard Pods now lives at Wannsee in Berlin.    

The exhibition opens on Friday, May 28, 2021, from 5 to 8 pm. 

On the occasion of the exhibition a catalog will be published in German and English with a text by Gianni Jetzer.   

For further information please contact Anna Helwing, [email protected] Or under +41 43 497 20 26

[1] Jetzer, Gianni. «On Reinhard Pods´s Painting». In: R. Pods – Arbeiten 1976 – 2021, 2021, p. 11