Robbie Bushe is an Edinburgh-based painter whose densely worked narrative paintings explore the ways in which people inhabit, share and protect the spaces around them. Architecture is rarely the subject, but rather a kind of nest or container for the lives taking place within it. Buildings are opened up, rearranged and invented, allowing private and public worlds to coexist and overlap.
Bushe studied Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art and was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 2017. A prize-winner in the John Moores Painting Prize in 2021, he received the RSA Houston Blackadder Mid-Career Painting Prize in 2023 and is an elected member of Contemporary British Painting. Recent solo exhibitions include Living Roomsat Irving Gallery, Oxford, and Ghosts in the Garden at Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh.
The five small paintings shown at Tatha Gallery, made between 2024 and 2026, share an interest in the strange private worlds that exist behind walls, beneath roofs and within apparently ordinary buildings.
In the newly completed Temporary Accommodation, a building is opened up to reveal multiple rooms occupied by disenfranchised inhabitants, suggesting the uneasy distinction between shelter and belonging. The Office, previously shown in Graham Crowley’s Silent Disco, reflects on the increasingly blurred boundary between domestic and working life since Covid: a computer workstation sits beneath a bunk bed as work, sleep and private life are compressed into the same space.
Elsewhere, the narratives become more ambiguous. Hole in the Wall offers a sideways glimpse into a building where distinctly macabre goings-on are unfolding. In The Rift, a physical chasm separating two parts of a shared home becomes a metaphor for the emotional distance that can develop between long-standing partners. Loft Ladder turns to the things we store away but cannot quite discard — objects, memories and previous lives pushed upwards and out of sight.
Across these works, humour and unease sit closely together. Walls, floors and ceilings offer shelter and privacy but also conceal what is happening immediately alongside us. Bushe repeatedly returns to the peculiar intimacy and isolation of contemporary life: our ability to live cheek by jowl while knowing remarkably little about what is happening on the other side of the wall.