German painter
Burkhard Held is German painter living and working in Berlin, Germany.[1] His art is based on figuration dissolving into abstraction.
Biography
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.[2] 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.[3]
Work
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.[4] 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.[5]
