Robbie Bushe RSA has exhibited his distinctive narrative works throughout the UK since 1990, winning several national awards including the Guthrie Medal at the Royal Scottish Academy and in 2016 the inaugural W. Gordon Smith painting prize.
Born in Liverpool in 1964, he grew up in Aberdeenshire, before graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 1990. Since then he has successfully worked as both an artist and lecturer; first at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, then at the University of Chichester, where he was the Head of Fine Art, before moving on to Kent Institute of Art and Design and Oxford Brookes University.
In 2007, he became Coordinator of Short Courses at Edinburgh College of Art, and now as part of the University of Edinburgh. He was President of Visual Arts Scotland from 2013 to 2016. Bushe’s recent art practices straddle the use of fragments of research, daydreams, observation and pictorial reconstruction. His structural but free-flowing drawings take as their starting point sprawling cities built on monumental panoramas – both improvised and real. His exhibition NeoNeanderthals, a collaboration with anthropologist Jeanne Cannizzo, was held at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2019.