Biography
MTV studio 1986
MTV launch
DIGITALISM Saatchi Gallery
Kim Mannes-Abbott is a pioneering digital artist and designer whose early adoption of Quantel’s Video Paintbox in 1984, while an art school undergraduate in London, helped shape the future of multimedia art. She was among the first artists to create multimedia work using the Paintbox, winning the ICA New Contemporaries Competition in 1986 with a groundbreaking series that fused digital and mixed media.
In 1987, she created the iconic visual language for MTV’s European launch, helping to define a new digital aesthetic. She travelled globally for Quantel as a key Paintbox artist and also advised the company’s engineers on refinements to the Paintbox user interface. Her work has been exhibited internationally and was featured on the cover of the iconic Paintboxed! book, which was launched at the Tate Modern in 1993.
Most recently, her digital work has been shown at The Computer Arts Society, the British Computer Society, Tate Modern, ArtMeta’s Paintboxed! exhibition in Basel in June 2025, and Digitalism at the Saatchi Gallery during The British Art Fair in September 2025, where her Paintbox artwork became the first digital art acquired by a traditional Swiss art collector. A significant body of her digital work has remained unseen until now.
Kim is also a multi-award-winning designer and design director, and the founder of KM/A Liquid Design, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where she continues to merge branding, design, and art.