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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. His paintings unfold as expansive, exposed worlds in which cities, interiors, and subterranean spaces are opened up to reveal layered scenes of everyday life. Across each canvas, moments of domestic routine, private activity, and remembered experience sit alongside imagined narratives, inviting the viewer to look slowly and closely as details and connections begin to emerge over time. These works blend the real and the invented, the personal and the public.
Bushe draws on the visual language of technical diagrams, mid-century cutaway illustrations, and comic imagery, creating works that balance clarity with curiosity. The viewer is drawn into these constructed environments, moving across their surfaces and piecing together fragments of story and space.
Robbie works fast, in bursts, juggling sketchbooks, watercolours, small oils, 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.
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 NeoNanderthals with anthropologist Jeanne Cannizzo was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2019.
In 2026, Robbie Bushe has a solo show at Irving Gallery, Oxford, his first outside Scotland for twenty years. Robbie Bushe | ‘Living Rooms’ runs from 7th May to 7th June 2026.
