Robbie Bushe RSA is a Scottish painter whose narrative compositions explore imagined architectures, absurd bureaucracies, and the emotional spaces of domestic life. His paintings often depict semi-fictional worlds built from memory, observation and speculative invention—populated by characters navigating strange but familiar systems.
Bushe taught in UK art schools for over 25 years, including posts at Gray’s School of Art (Aberdeen), University of Chichester, Oxford Brookes University, and the University of Edinburgh, where he was Lecturer in Fine Art until 2025. He now works full-time as a painter from his home studio in south Edinburgh.
In 2023, Bushe was awarded the Royal Scottish Academy’s Houston Blackadder Mid-Career Painting Prize. He was runner-up in the Contemporary British Painting Prize and a prize winner at the inaugural Scottish Landscape Awards. In 2021, his painting Neanderthal Futures Infirmary was a prizewinner at the John Moores Painting Prize in Liverpool.
His work has been widely exhibited, including solo shows at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh, and features in curated group exhibitions across the UK. Bushe is an elected member of the Royal Scottish Academy of Contemporary British Painting. In 2024, he co-curated Frontiers: Painting in Scotland Now at the Royal Scottish Academy—an exhibition reflecting on the vitality and direction of contemporary Scottish painting.
He is a former President of Visual Arts Scotland, and his work is held in public and private collections throughout the UK.