Robert Burda was born on 19th April, 1942 in Neuburg/Donau. His formative influences were the time he spent in the sheltered atmosphere of his parent's home, and his upbringing in the Bremen-Blumenthal district. Ever since his early childhood years and youth, he has spent a lot of time painting, repeatedly drawing the Bremer buses with photographic precision - fascinated by their technical development. Since the age of 26, Robert Burda has lived in the residential area of the Alexianer hospital in Münster.

Thematically speaking, Burda is predominantly interested in motifs from his past, such as the city buses, the neurological clinic and his parents' house in Bremen. He also picks up contemporary themes, such as his room with all its furnishings. Focal points of his work are architectonic facades and plan views of buildings. He paints and draws at individual pictures for weeks, months, and in some cases years. Often, years afterwards, he searches out works he terminated prematurely, and completes them. He works with painstaking accuracy, overpainting parts of the pictures until they meet his concept precisely.

Robert Burda usually draws and paints on simple drawing paper. He starts with a pencil sketch, for which he often uses a ruler. Even freehand, he achieves an astonishing exactness of line. He often orients himself by newspaper cuttings, which he has carefully collected and which always have a personal biographical association for him. With his photographic memory, he can also reproduce complex situations, such as the room layout of a house, with all the objects and the precise seating arrangement of the persons at a summer festival, completely from memory.

In his pictures, Robert Burda discusses biographically significant motifs. Past and present stations in his life history are raised to high esteem through accurately detailed reproduction and careful inscription. The structured organization of the picture, the precision of the lines and the perspectives, which often show the situations seen from above, allow a certain distance to be perceived in his pictures. Robert Burda can express emotionally moving experiences, such as his stays in the Bremen neurological clinic, in an objective form, and successfully integrate his life story into his pictures.