Nosediving planes, withered trees, alien landscapes: these have been some of the visually arresting images of Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke’s album art for Radiohead, The Smile and Yorke’s own solo records. Now an exhibition of the pair’s work, titled This Is What You Get (and spanning 1995’s The Bends to 2024’s Cutouts) is being staged at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, featuring the original works and illustrating their evolution via unseen sketches and notebooks.
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Yorke and Donwood first met as art students at the University of Exeter in the late ‘80s. Interviewed for the exhibition’s image-rich catalogue, Yorke reckons that the parameters of his and Donwood’s creative partnership were set in place back then.
“I’m extremely restless,” says Yorke. “I’ve never been really confident as a visual artist. I don’t think I’ve got any particularly good technique or anything; I’m painfully aware of my limitations. I’m also painfully aware of how incredibly skilled he is at making things happen.”
Lena Fritsch, Curator of Contemporary and Modern Art at the Ashmolean, thinks there’s far more to the duo’s symbiosis. “They just really complement each other,” she tells MOJO. “Stanley, in terms of technical skills, is more of an artist. But Thom, on the conceptual level, is really interesting. They both have something that the other one doesn’t have.”
Through the years, the duo’s techniques have moved through various artistic disciplines, from their adventures in image-scanning and deep Photoshop zooming for OK Computer(“Super fun when you’re really stoned,” Yorke notes) to the large-scale paintings of Kid A/Amnesiac, and on through experiments with etched copper plates (In Rainbows) and the strange cartography of The Smile albums.
“Right from the beginning they’ve been open to trying different materials, different techniques,” says Fritsch. “With The Bends, they were filming analogue TVs and were really interested in this idea of the pixelated image, and how that looks abstract, but also like a painting.”
Visitors to the exhibition, which opens on August 6, will likely be drawn to Yorke and Donwood’s sketching notebooks, opened to public view for the first time. “Stanley’s notebooks are often a bit larger in size, and there are more drawings in them,” Fritsch says. “Whereas for Thom, there’re more lyrics in them. They also used to fax ideas to each other, which I thought was fun to see.”
Other details are revealed, such as the abstract paintings for 2016’s _A Moon Shaped Pool_having been purposely left outside the French studio where Radiohead were recording, to be lashed by wind and rain, or the poster sloganeering of OK Computer being inspired by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “War Is Over!” billboard campaign. “Around that time I was totally obsessed with the Lennon thing,” Yorke states.
Lena Fritsch says that Donwood and Yorke are thrilled by the fact that their art is now the focus of such a prestigious retrospective, not least because it reminded the pair of going into music megastores of the past and seeing other album artworks on large scale display. “They were both got really… almost emotional,” she reveals, “and said, y’know, ‘Now we’re having an exhibition. Isn’t this amazing?’”
This Is What You Get runs at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from August 6 to January 11, 2026. More info and tickets HERE.
Stanley Donwood is represented by Tin Man Art. More information and to purchase prints HERE.
Main photo: Emma Wood. Courtesy of Tin Man Art. Artwork: Stanley Donwood & Thom Yorke.