Radiohead exhibition at Ashmolean brings exciting vibe

By Theresa Thompson, Timeless Travel's Arts Correspondent

Stanley Donwood (b. 1968) and Thom Yorke (b. 1968), Get Out Before Saturday, 2000, Acrylic on canvas, 167.9 x 167.9 cm. Private Collection. © Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke

A doom-laden scene of tragic trees and bared mountains and an amorphous being bursting from a fiery sky is the eye-catching image on the Ashmolean’s promotional material for their exhibition This is What You Get, just opened in Oxford this summer.

Inside the three galleries, the original acrylic on canvas painting holds its own among a panoply of visually striking images of nose-diving aeroplanes, fast-moving motorways, ghostly people, stick people, little people, desiccated forests, snowscapes, moonscapes, dystopian and chaotic cityscapes, in an exhibition that explores the 30-year long collaboration between artists Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke in creating the iconic images behind Radiohead.

The internationally acclaimed band, Radiohead formed in Oxfordshire in the mid-1980s. Comprising frontman Thom Yorke, brothers Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway, the band was signed to EMI in 1991, and to date has sold 30 million records worldwide. In 2019 they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

The exhibition is not, the museum emphasises, an exhibition about the music; it is about the art, about exploring the evolution of the images, the creative process at work over the three decades. There are over 180 objects on show, from the original paintings for album covers to digital compositions and etchings, unpublished drawings to lyrics in sketchbooks. While there’s no ambient music in the galleries, fans will be glad to know that you can don headphones to hear excerpts from tracks at half a dozen music stations dotted around.

Left to right: Donwood Sketchbook,© Stanley Donwood; Stanley Donwood (b. 1968) and Thom Yorke (b. 1968), Soken Fen, 2013, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm, Collection of Stanley Donwood © Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke; Stanley Donwood (b. 1968), London Views (6 of 14), 2005-6, Lino cut print block, 30 x 20 x 0.4 cm. Collection of the artist. © Stanley Donwood

Dr Lena Fritsch, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, explains that This Is What You Get, the exhibition title is taken from the lyrics of the chorus from Radiohead’s 1997 hit, Karma Police from their OK Computer album, adding that ‘It represents Stanley and Thom’s creative approach: direct, honest, poetic, dark, and sometimes comedic.’

The exhibition starts with LP covers and CDs, posters and T-shirts, laid out floor to ceiling, giving a sort of record shop vibe. It makes a strong impact, and thereafter it is organised chronologically, album by album, with sketchbooks and paintings revealing the creative forces at work. Unless an out and out Radiohead fan, this format could perhaps become a mite repetitive. For Radiohead fans, however, the show is a no-brainer; it’ll be a goldmine.

Snippets grab attention and stories present themselves throughout the displays. One legendary story is how they got to create The Bends album cover. This year – and the exhibition - marks 30 years since the release of that seminal second album.

Stanley Donwood (b. 1968) and Thom Yorke (b. 1968), The Bends, 1995, Album cover © 1995 XL Recordings Ltd.

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 joined forces in 1994 to design the cover of Radiohead’s single My Iron Lung, and the related album, The Bends (1995). The story goes that the pair sneaked into an Oxford hospital looking for an iron lung to photograph for the song. However, finding one they decided that it looked too dull, so filmed a resuscitation dummy found in the basement instead. Back home, they manipulated their video footage images to create the distorted half human, half mannequin of the cover picture, an image that harmonised with the feel of the album.

The artists work incredibly closely on the designs, working beside and often over each other, sometimes erasing what the other’s just done. For OK Computer (1997), they played with images taken from their sketchbooks, from magazines and from the internet (then in its infancy) to create the album’s artwork. The pair had a rule they strictly imposed upon themselves, that they couldn’t use the ‘undo’ function. Any mistakes had to be rubbed out with the eraser or covered with something else.

Lena Fritsch points out how unusual it is for a band to do all the artwork and marketing for themselves. Donwood has worked on all of Radiohead’s covers from The Bends onwards, besides Yorke’s other projects, including The Smile, his pandemic-born band launched in 2022.

Radiohead, all along renowned for its experimental approach to music, not only experiments with a range of artistic materials, styles and scales for the artwork but also ranges widely for inspiration.

Artists Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood. Photograph by Julian Broad, courtesy of TIN MAN ART

For example, that blistering exhibition poster image, Get Out Before Saturday (2000), is one of a series painted by Donwood for their Kid A and Amnesiac albums. Donwood notes that he was influenced by the war footage and news coming out at the time from the former Yugoslavia.

More recently, Yorke and Donwood’s work has been concerned with landscape - in the most expansive sense. Covers and publicity material began to encompass cityscapes, suburbs, the countryside (bare trees and branches), moonscapes, dreamscapes, current events, and tapping into the sub-conscious, the particular visual world evoked by each project’s unique sound.

Theirs is an enigmatic world, an enigmatic vision, an enigmatic sound.

Less mysterious, more tangible maybe, for Yorke’s debut solo album, The Eraser (2006), Donwood’s black and white linocuts were inspired by the Boscastle flood in Cornwall in August 2004, near where Yorke was living at the time. Donwood exchanges Boscastle’s tragedy for a scene of contemporary London landmarks engulfed in a huge dark wave while a figure in a rowing boat struggles with the waves. Meanwhile, a mysterious lone figure issues a futile command to the sea. In one of the conversations between Fritsch, Thom and Stanley published in the exhibition catalogue, Stanley explains that the pictures were “loosely based on a book of old engravings” – that is to say, the Nuremberg Chronicle, an illustrated history of the world first published in 1493.

Stanley Donwood (b. 1968) and Thom Yorke (b. 1968),Wall of Eyes, 2023, Tempera, gouache and gesso on linen, 122 x 122 cm. Private Collection. © Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke

In the final gallery, amid other recent works, inspiration for some of the works came from an exhibition of maps they’d seen at Oxford’s Bodleian Library just after the lockdown ended. Their painting media changed, temporarily, and they start using tempera and gesso, gold leaf in some – for the “old fashioned” “exciting” “brilliant colours”.

“I just love the colours,” said Donwood.

“They have a kind of timelessness…” added Fritsch.

I enjoyed this exhibition. It is refreshingly different for the Ashmolean, and although it most likely won’t be to everyone’s tastes, it will attract new audiences into the museum, which is surely a good thing.

Lena Fritsch again: “Showcasing their unique artistic collaboration, the exhibition offers fresh views on the art of album covers, exploring the complex relationships between visual art, music, and text.”

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THIS IS WHAT YOU GET

Ashmolean Museum

Showing until: 11 January 2026

For more details click here