Burkhard Held

Burkhard Held is German painter living and working in Berlin, Germany.

His art is based on figuration dissolving into abstraction.

Held was born in 1953.

He studied at the Berlin University of the Arts as a "Meisterschüler" (Master Disciple) of Dietmar Lemcke from 1972 to 1979, and was granted a scholarship at Garrucha (Spain) by the "German National Academic Foundation" (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes).

In 1993 he became professor at the Berlin University of the Arts.

and later served as a professor at the China Academy of Art ("Chinesisch-deutsche Kunstakademie") in Hangzhou, PRC.

Held is responsible for the organization of the cooperation of the Berlin University of the Arts and China.

Burkhard Held is a figurative painter, who dissolves his motifs – landscapes, portraits, flowers – into color fields with a strong tendency towards autonomy.

His strongly colored all-over images reinterpret things as abstract and then lead the back into figuration.

In 2009 Held started to dedicate himself to the subject of flowers: blossoms become compositions with a landscape character, and are distributed in equally strong colors across the canvas.

Thus they gain lyrical overtones and additional brightness.

Hence Held has also begun to contrast figurative elements (such as the sky) - intentionally without painterly differentiation - with a hatching-like color field technique; this in traditional, monumental formats of his work.