2024 season opens with digital art

Press Release 23/04/21

The Sidney Nolan Trust opens its 2024 visitor season on Saturday 23 March with Painting With Light, an exhibition of early digital artwork created by Sidney Nolan and his contemporaries. It explores the dawn of digital art including famous names such as David Hockey, Richard Hamilton, Lea Lublin and Larry Rivers.

Launched globally in 1981, the Quantel Paintbox was a revolutionary computer graphics system and the world’s first digital design studio. It brought digital images into every home via news, weather graphics, titles, logos, music videos and television adverts. The Paintbox would heavily influence the look and feel of the following decade and would pave the way for the “Photoshop Era.”

The exhibition showcases the extent of Sidney Nolan’s experiments with the Paintbox through previously unseen artwork from our archives including video and other material.

The exhibition also includes artwork by students from Hereford College of Art’s Digital Futures Programme.

Antony Mottershead, the Sidney Nolan Trust’s Curator and Creative Producer commented;

“The artwork that Nolan created using the Quantel Paintbox is yet another instance of his eagerness to experiment with new tools and technologies – a further voyage of discovery on the cusp of the digital age. The exhibition opens a window onto his early digital forays and demonstrates how artists and designers pioneered a visual language that we often take for granted.”

The exhibition has been organised with Adrian Wilson, a pioneer in the digital manipulation of photographs. Adrian has generously supported the project, lending rare artwork and archive materials for display. He recently curated the touring exhibition How Quantel’s Paintbox changed our world (2023).