Pioneering digital artist Kim Mannes-Abbott is presenting a solo showcase within Spotlight: Digitalism, the digital art exhibition running as part of the British Art Fair at Saatchi Gallery from 24 to 27 September. The selection spans an unusually long stretch of her career, from the mid 1980s right through to work made this year, tracing a practice that helped shape digital image-making before most people even had a name for it.
At the centre of the presentation are her Quantel Paintbox works, pieces that have spent decades in her own archive, rarely, if ever, shown publicly, and which now arrive at a moment when their particular visual language suddenly feels remarkably current again. The Paintbox itself was a fairly primitive tool by today’s standards, one of the earliest computer graphics systems available to artists in the 1980s, and what Mannes-Abbott did with it went considerably beyond what the machine was actually designed to do. Rather than working within its limitations, she pushed directly against them, treating glitches and technical failures not as mistakes to be corrected but as genuine creative material, years before that kind of approach became a recognisable aesthetic in its own right.
Alongside the early Paintbox pieces, the exhibition also includes a run of global commercial collaborations from across her career, work that shows how quickly her experimental digital techniques moved from the margins of the art world into mainstream visual culture, adopted by brands and agencies who wanted exactly the kind of bold, slightly unstable imagery she had already been developing on her own terms. Rounding out the show is recent work from her ongoing series An Ordinary Life, bringing the presentation up to date and letting visitors trace a direct line from her earliest experiments to where her practice stands today.
Seeing the full arc laid out together is genuinely instructive. The early Paintbox works, made at a moment when artists were essentially inventing an entirely new visual grammar from scratch, carry a rawness that reads today less as dated technology and more as a kind of prescient handmade digital aesthetic, the sort of thing later generations of artists would spend years trying to deliberately recreate using considerably more sophisticated tools. Mannes-Abbott got there first, and largely by accident, simply by refusing to treat the machine’s limitations as fixed boundaries.
What makes the Saatchi presentation feel timely is how closely that original impulse, embracing glitch, instability and the visible seams of a new technology, maps onto conversations happening right now around AI-generated imagery and the aesthetics of digital tools still finding their footing. Mannes-Abbott was navigating exactly that kind of uncertain, formative territory forty years ago, and the works on view at Spotlight: Digitalism suggest she understood something about the future of digital image-making long before the rest of the field caught up.
Paintboxed! (self-portrait), 1992 / Artist: Kim Mannes-Abbott / Photography: Hans Peterson
Kim’s story therefore starts long before Photoshop became part of our visual vocabulary. In 1984, while studying graphic design, she first encountered the Quantel Video Paintbox. “It was revolutionary. There was nothing like it,” she says. Launched by British technology company Quantel in 1981 and costing $250,000 a unit, the Paintbox was largely the preserve of major broadcasters until Quantel made several available to British art colleges.
Blue Steel, 1992 / Artist: Kim Mannes-Abbott / Photography: Mirjam Jeurissen
Mannes-Abbott became one of its earliest adopters, combining her own drawings and darkroom photography on screen using a pressure-sensitive pen and tablet. With no undo function, the technology’s limitations and glitches became part of the creative process. “I ended up spending almost all my time on the Paintbox. It opened up a completely new visual language. You could create images in ways that were previously impossible. It was early multimedia, really.” This was five years before Photoshop 1.0 was released.
By 1987, Mannes-Abbott was working on the launch of MTV Europe, helping shape the channel’s visual identity through logos, bumpers and animation.
MTV Europe / 1987 Credits: All digital artwork displayed is the intellectual property of Kim Mannes-Abbott and /or the respective Paintbox artists and photographers.
Her work continued across art, music, and fashion. In the 1990s, she also worked with photographers Inez & Vinoodh, manipulating their photography on the Quantel Graphic Paintbox for The Face.
Many of these works are now available as limited-edition, museum-quality prints, making rare pieces from Mannes-Abbott’s early digital practice available to collectors. Something is striking about encountering them today: although created decades ago, they can initially appear entirely contemporary. Their rarity, meticulous production and enduring visual power give these early works a new life. At the same time, their origins in the formative years of digital image-making remain integral to their significance.
Work from this period is now being rediscovered. Images created in the late 1980s and early 1990s, some of which have spent decades in Kim’s archive, reflect the distinctive visual language created by the limitations of early digital technology. “What struck me was how contemporary that early work still feels,” she says. “There was something about the limitations of the Paintbox technology that created a very distinctive visual language that placed it in time.”
Today, Kim continues to develop her digital art through An Ordinary Life, a layered body of visual storytelling. She has a working Paintbox in her Amsterdam studio, linked to contemporary technology, and continues to create new work there.
New Contemporaries #10, 1985 / Artist: Kim Mannes-Abbott / Photography & illustration: Kim Mannes-Abbott
Top Photo © Artlyst 2026
Pioneering digital artist Kim Mannes-Abbott is exhibiting a solo presentation in Spotlight: Digitalism, the digital art exhibition at the British Art Fair at Saatchi Gallery from 24th – 27th September 2026.