Pioneering digital artist Kim Mannes-Abbott is showing a solo presentation within Spotlight: Digitalism, the digital art exhibition at British Art Fair, held at Saatchi Gallery from 24th – 27th September 2026. Bringing together work from the mid-1980s to the present day, the presentation includes her highly regarded Quantel Paintbox works, global commercial collaborations and recent work from An Ordinary Life. Many of the early works have spent decades in her archive and are now being seen again at a moment when their distinctive digital aesthetic feels strikingly current.
Bold and experimental, these pioneering works emerged at a formative moment in digital image-making, as artists began exploring an entirely new visual language. Kim pushed the Paintbox and its limitations into unexpected territory, embracing glitches and helping to define new possibilities for digital image-making years before these techniques became commonplace.
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 came across the Quantel Video Paintbox for the first time. “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.
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 limitations and glitches of the technology 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 construct images in ways that simply were not possible before. 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.
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. There is something 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, while their origins in the formative years of digital image-making remain firmly part of 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 body of visual storytelling built in layers. She has a working Paintbox in her Amsterdam studio, linked to contemporary technology, where she continues to create new work.
VISITING INFORMATION
DIGITALISM #3, British Art Fair
Saatchi Gallery, London
24–27 September 2026
Gallery 14 / Booth D3
Find more information for The British Art Fair HERE
