OXFORD.- This is What You Get will be the first large institutional show exploring the visual art of Stanley Donwood, Thom Yorke and the iconic images of Radiohead. The exhibition will look at the artists’ 30-year collaboration with over 180 objects ranging from the original paintings for album covers to digital compositions and etchings, to unpublished drawings and lyrics in their sketchbooks. Developed and curated with Donwood and Yorke, the show offers a unique opportunity to look at the creative forces behind some of the most important and influential music of the past few decades.
Radiohead was formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in the mid-1980s. Comprising front-man Thom Yorke, brothers Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway, the band was signed to EMI in 1991. Their first single, Creep (1992), was an international hit before it reached a wider UK audience. To date the band has sold 30 million records worldwide. They were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019.
Thom Yorke (b. 1968) and the artist Stanley Donwood (b. 1968) became friends at Exeter University where they were both studying English literature and fine art. They first joined forces in 1994 to design the cover of Radiohead’s single My Iron Lung and the related second album, The Bends. Having sneaked into the basement of Oxford’s John Radcliffe hospital, they filmed a resuscitation dummy whose face was ‘like that of an android discovering for the first time the sensations of ecstasy and agony, simultaneously’. Back home, they photographed the film visuals on a TV screen, which resulted in the iconic, pixelated image that harmonised with the distorted feel of the album.
Organised chronologically, the exhibition showcases the great variety of their work and explores the evolution of the images for Radiohead’s legendary albums and Yorke’s musical projects outside the band. The show opens with a floor to ceiling display of LP covers, all potently evocative of the period of their creation. Each album was accompanied by a collaborative visual art project. From a bedrock of images, one was selected for a cover, while the others accompanied the album on CD booklets, vinyl records, t-shirts and merchandise, and on their website. Radiohead have had, perhaps uniquely, complete creative control of the visual content of all platforms accompanying their music.
The exhibition reveals how the artists played with early technology. The artwork for OK Computer (1997) was made on a computer with a self-imposed challenge, forbidding themselves from using the ‘undo’ function. Any mistakes had to be rubbed out with the eraser or covered with something else. Following this, Donwood moved towards painting at scale, working with acrylic and oil paint, charcoal and artex. Some images created for Kid A (2000) were influenced by war photography coming out of the former Yugoslavia. Donwood recalled the impact of a newspaper image of snow marked with boots, cigarette butts and blood. Underneath the snowy landscapes of Kid A are the concentration camps, the violence covered over with paint as the reality was hidden by snow.
Experimenting with a great range of artistic materials, styles and sizes, Yorke and Donwood’s work has been concerned with landscape in the most expansive sense. Encompassing cityscapes, suburbs, the countryside, moonscapes, dreamscapes, current events and psychic states, their visual worlds are evoked by each project’s unique sound. Their work offers an intense aesthetic and psychological experience of what it is like to live with anxiety over what we’re losing with our ecologically destructive lifestyles. Donwood’s linocut for Yorke’s debut solo album, The Eraser (2006), was inspired by the Boscastle flood in Cornwall: it shows familiar London landmarks engulfed in a huge dark wave while a lone figure issues a futile command to the sea. The inspiration for The King of Limbs (2011) was Wistman’s Wood and ancient trees. Both artists have described drawing trees as ‘meditative’ or ‘addictive’.
Throughout the exhibition, Yorke and Donwood’s workings are shown in unpublished notebooks and sketches which have never before been shown to the public. Yorke has kept pages and pages of lyrics, scribbled out and re-written in different versions. He will take snippets of phrases or thoughts on pieces of paper that are piled up in the recording studio to be grabbed at random when a piece of music needs a new idea.
The exhibition closes with newer paintings that feature on The Smile’s A Light for Attracting Attention (2022), Wall of Eyes (2024) and Cutouts (2024). The pandemic and cancelled schedules afforded the artists time to turn a corner, working side by side on the same canvas in a small shed at Yorke’s home. Drawing inspiration from an exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries, Talking Maps (2019-20), they created their most optimistic and colourful paintings to date - vibrant, benevolent landscapes. In another departure, they have found these paintings lend themselves to being reproduced as large tapestries, woven in Brussels, which will also be shown in the Ashmolean’s permanent music and tapestry gallery.
Dr Lena Fritsch, exhibition curator, Ashmolean Museum, says: ‘This Is What You Get, the exhibition title, is a line taken from Radiohead’s well-known song Karma Police (1997). It represents Stanley and Thom’s creative approach: direct, honest, poetic, dark, and sometimes comedic. Showcasing their unique artistic collaboration, this exhibition offers fresh views on the art of album covers, exploring the complex relationships between visual art, music, and text.’
