Fatal Beauty is the subject of the current exhibition by Berlin artist Burkhard Held. A title that first reminds of a dramatic film or a thriller. In which way can beauty be fatal? What disastrous incident has happened to the ones depicted in the paintings? Before the inner eye of the beholder, possible scenarios are played out and develop into their own story.
Burkhard Held describes himself as a great cinephile. Even before he discovered painting as the medium of his art, he had dealt with films and their motifs. Naturally, has also been dealing with this topic as a painter since 2013. His acrylics painted in transverse format remind of a filmstrip. Like a still image, he selects a snapshot to depict in his painting. By his color selection and the structured application of paint, Held creates the unique mood in his works. For him, everyone has their own image memory, filled with a variety of scenes and images from the movie world. They are personal memories that are retrieved when viewing the artworks. In his works, he directs our attention to details that are otherwise below our perceptive capacity, and for a moment he seems to succeed in stopping time.
Burkhard Held was born in Berlin in 1953 and has been a professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin since 1993.