Robbie Bushe: Living Rooms

7 May-7 Jun 2026

'The Pianist (Study 2)', 2024. Oil on panel, 35 x 28 x 2 cm

Overview

Irving Gallery is delighted to present a solo show by Edinburgh-based artist Robbie Bushe RSA. Robbie has received national recognition, including prizes at the John Moores Painting Prize, the Contemporary British Painting Prize, and the Jackson’s Painting Prize. In 2023, he was awarded the RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Painting Award, which enabled a sustained period of studio work and the production of this ambitious new series of paintings presented in ‘Living Rooms’.

These paintings unfold as expansive, cutaway 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.

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.

‘Living Rooms’ presents both works in oil and watercolour paintings.