TOKYO.- Fergus McCaffrey Tokyo announced the solo exhibition of paintings by the German artist Reinhard Pods (b. 1951, Berlin), marking his first exhibition in Asia. This exhibition features 15 paintings created between 1979 and 2025, installed across the ground floor and the gallery’s newly expanded lower level space.

Pods attended the Academy of Fine Arts in West Berlin from 1971-77, before arriving in New York’s lower Eastside. There he lived and painted in a loft on Elizabeth Street, 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 newly opened SO36 club and performance space.

Pods belongs to the generation of German and American artists such as 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 his earlier work; married to a new palette of pastel-infused oil paint, watercolor, and spray-paint.

Posters, postcards, and catalogs (Galerie Michael Haas, Berlin, 2025) will be available during the exhibition, including a limited number of copies signed by the artist.