About
Robert Scholten
Robert Scholten is a Melbourne-based contemporary artist working across painting, drawing and watercolour. His practice moves between direct observation and imagined worlds, using the contemporary city as both subject and setting.
His current body of work, Urban Mythologies, brings figures, architecture, animals and symbolic imagery together in constructed urban environments. Drawing from observation, memory and imagination, the paintings explore the point where everyday experience begins to become strange, theatrical or mythic.
Alongside his studio practice, Scholten maintains an ongoing practice of drawing and painting cities from life. Working in Melbourne and while travelling, these immediate observations provide a visual language of architecture, atmosphere, movement and human activity that continues to feed back into his larger studio works.
01 Practice
Painting between observation and imagined worlds
Scholten’s practice begins with looking. Drawing and painting from life provide a way of recording the particular character of a place — its light, architecture, movement, weather and the incidental details of everyday urban experience. These observations are often made quickly, using ink and watercolour to reduce complex scenes into essential shapes, tones and gestures.
In the studio, this observational language moves into more constructed territory. Urban Mythologies combines figures, animals, architecture and fragments of landscape into invented scenes that sit somewhere between the familiar and the imagined. Rather than illustrating a fixed narrative, the paintings suggest moments within larger, unresolved stories.
These two approaches continually inform one another. Direct observation gives the imagined work a sense of lived experience, while working from memory and invention creates new ways of seeing the everyday city. Across both, Scholten is interested in atmosphere, ambiguity and the possibility of finding something strange or mythic within ordinary contemporary life.
02 · Background
A practice shaped by place and experience
Robert Scholten has worked across painting, drawing, illustration and public art for more than two decades. He completed a Master of Fine Art in Painting at RMIT University in 2009, and his practice has developed across both independent studio work and large-scale commissioned projects.
Living and working abroad has been an important part of this development. Periods spent in Japan and Thailand, along with extensive drawing and painting while travelling through Europe and Asia, have contributed to an ongoing interest in cities as places where different histories, cultures and visual languages overlap.
Alongside his studio practice, Scholten has produced commissioned work for cultural, public and commercial contexts. Major projects include a series of fifteen large-scale Melbourne drawings for The Ritz-Carlton Melbourne and commissioned works for Defence Bank, alongside murals, illustration and public art projects.
These different experiences continue to feed into the studio: direct observation, travel, commercial image-making and large-scale public work all contribute to the visual language from which his paintings are constructed.
“The city begins in observation and continues in imagination.”
04 · Selected CV
SELECTED EXPERIENCE
EDUCATION
Master of Fine Art (Painting)
RMIT University, Melbourne, 2009
SELECTED COMMISSIONS & PROJECTS
2026 Space2b / St Kilda Primary School — Public Art
2025 Defence Bank — 50th Anniversary Commission
2023 The Ritz-Carlton Melbourne — Commissioned Artworks
…
VIEW FULL CV →