Robbie Bushe, 'The Mound'

Robbie Bushe is a narrative painter drawn to imagined architecture, layered memory, and the social structures we build around ourselves. His paintings often take the form of sprawling cross-sections—cutaway views of cities, buildings, and lives. These works blend the real and the invented, the personal and the public. He draws from comics, sci-fi cinema, and textbook diagrams, merging timelines and compressing space to tell visual stories.

Robbie works fast, in bursts, juggling sketchbooks and large canvases. Some parts are tightly planned; others more chaotic or instinctive. That tension, he explains, keeps him engaged. The people in his paintings are mostly fictional, but their world reflects places he has lived—Liverpool, Aberdeenshire, Oxford, Edinburgh—and stories glimpsed from stairwells, buses, and daydreams. Painting remains his way of making sense of it all.

Robbie Bushe RSA is a Scottish-based painter known for intricately detailed, narrative-driven artworks that explore fictional cityscapes, speculative histories, and social infrastructure. His large-scale paintings draw on cutaway illustration techniques, often populated with imagined characters and urban vignettes.

Born in Liverpool in 1964 and raised in Aberdeenshire, he studied Painting at Edinburgh College of Art. His work has received national recognition, including the Guthrie Medal (1997), W. Gordon Smith Painting Prize (2016), John Moores Painting Prize (2021), and Highly Commended at the Contemporary British Painting Prize (2023). In 2023, he was awarded the inaugural RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Painting Prize.

Bushe has taught at Gray’s School of Art, Oxford Brookes, Chichester, and the University of Edinburgh. He is an elected member of the Royal Scottish Academy and Contemporary British Painting. His collaborative project  NEONEANDERTHALS with anthropologist Jeanne Cannizzo was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2019.

Robbie Bushe will have a solo show at Irving Gallery in April-May 2026.