Burkhard was one of the first artists to show photographs in galleries and museums at the end of the 1960s. Numerous major exhibitions have made his work known (1983 Kunsthalle Basel, 1984 Musée Rath, Geneva, 1988 Kunsthalle Bern).

As a documentarist of Harald Szeemann's exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Bern, Burkhard, a trained photographer, developed a close relationship with art in the 1960s. From the very beginning, his own oeuvre has been characterized by his work-immanent reflection on the media of painting and photography. Images simpler 'Motifs such as interiors, landscapes, cut-outs of human bodies, animals and plants are applied in an initially irritating way to a loosely hung canvas or, more recently, to flags, combined with panels of monochrome painting or extremely enlarged. Alienation from the supposedly familiar and the familiar happens as a result. The proximity to painting exposes the illusionism of photography and makes us aware of its pictorial nature. The unusual scale creates references to real architecture. In this way, photography also becomes object art used as an installation.

What is experienced as brittle ultimately serves as abstraction to gain distance from the sensual world of experience. Despite the harshness of photographic proximity, the motifs indirectly acquire an aura: they become secrets, hiding, as it were, behind their always incomplete appearance. A leg, for example, becomes a supporting pillar as well as a trunk, an ear becomes a sheltering shell as well as a seductive body opening, a falcon's wing becomes a warming and decorative plumage as well as a metaphor for immateriality and freedom. Burkhard's fragments enter into a new horizon of meaning that can only be grasped by the viewer in a vague way, become poetry.

The exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zug brings together works from all phases of the artist's career. Also on view are collaborative works with Markus Raetz, Niele Toroni and Franz West. Numerous new works were created on the occasion of the exhibition.