Robbie Bushe RSA British, b. 1964

Robbie Bushe RSA is an Edinburgh-based painter whose work explores architecture, memory and the ways in which people inhabit and shape constructed environments. His paintings often take the form of imagined or reconstructed spaces – from domestic interiors and gardens to schools, institutions, cityscapes and large architectural cross-sections – populated by fragments of narrative and everyday life.

Drawing is central to Bushe’s practice. His paintings evolve through observation, memory, invention and accumulated visual research, often combining several viewpoints within a single composition. Familiar places are dismantled and reassembled, allowing apparently ordinary settings to become theatrical, psychologically charged or quietly dystopian. Humour and absurdity frequently sit alongside more serious concerns around social organisation, planning, bureaucracy and our relationship with the built environment.

Bushe studied Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art and has exhibited widely throughout the UK. He was elected a Royal Scottish Academician in 2017 and is an elected member of Contemporary British Painting.

His work has received numerous awards, including the inaugural W. Gordon Smith Painting Prize, the City of Edinburgh Prize at the Scottish Landscape Awards and the RSA Houston Blackadder Mid-Career Painting Prize. He was also a prizewinner in the John Moores Painting Prize in 2021 and was Highly Commended in the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2023.

Recent solo exhibitions include Living Rooms at Irving Gallery, Oxford (2026), Ghosts in the Garden at Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh (2024), and Dwell at Open Eye Gallery (2021). Recent selections include the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize (both 2026).