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).
[3] 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.
[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.