Radiohead’s Enigmatic Album Art Gets the Museum Treatment—See 5 Highlights

To own a Radiohead record is to inherit a haunting visual world. Here, the art rock of OK Computer (1997) is wed with chalky collages, the downbeat electronica of Kid A (2000) accompanied by jagged alien vistas, and the jazzy abstraction of The King of Limbs (2011) represented by chilling specters. The band’s music doesn’t just ask to be heard; it insists on being seen.

That visual experience at the heart of “This Is What You Get” at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the U.K., the first institutional exhibition to spotlight the art surrounding Radiohead. More than 180 objects have been gathered here, curator Lena Fritsch told me, to encourage “thinking about the relationship of visual art and music in a wider sense, to look at album covers differently.”

The show is a homecoming of sorts for a band that formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, almost four decades ago. From the early ’90s, the five-piece would create music of increasing complexity, the grinding rock of its debut single “Creep” giving way to electronic and symphonic outings from “Idioteque” to “Burn the Witch.” Among the world’s most popular alt-rock bands, Radiohead is today also one of its most enigmatic (the group just announced its first tour in seven years), its strange soundscapes and cryptic lyrics matched by a sparse online presence.

Contributing to the band’s mystique is, of course, its indelible cover art. Since 1995’s The Bends, their album sleeves have been devised by artist Stanley Donwood in close collaboration with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. The pair met while studying art at the University of Exeter in the ’80s and have forged a decades-spanning partnership built on art, music, dark humor, and a shared appetite for experimentation. The Ashmolean exhibition, in fact, doubles as a portrait of their joint practice.

“It’s really rare that an artist is involved in the creative process as early as Donwood,” Fritsch said. “His album covers and all the visual work relating to Radiohead are not just illustrations of sounds and texts, but created in tandem with them.”

As seen in the show, Donwood and Yorke’s collaboration has thrived on a kind of restlessness. Fritsch characterized it as “not a development or evolution in a linear sense, but there’s a lot of going back and forth, being fascinated by one artistic medium or style, then getting bored of it before being super inspired by something else again.” Where they threw themselves into computer manipulation for The Bends and OK Computer, for example, Hail to the Thief (2003) and A Moon Shaped Pool (2016) returned them to a painterly approach.

Often, too, Donwood sets up a workshop close to where Radiohead were recording, allowing Yorke to easily switch between modes and Donwood to shape the cover art to the music. The process is such that, according to Donwood, “I find it hard to look at [the art] without hearing the music. It’s encoded.” This method of working also birthed Donwood and Yorke’s 2023 series of paintings, “The Crow Flies,” which debuted at London’s Tin Man Art and is on view at the Ashmolean.

“The music and the visual work both matter very much to me,” Yorke told me at that time. “One liberates the other a lot of the time.”

Here are five highlights from “This Is What You Get” that reveal just how Donwood and Yorke have married—and liberated—music and image over the years.

The Collages of OK Computer

One of the defining albums of the 1990s, OK Computer was Radiohead’s atmospheric meditation on existential dread and urban dislocation. And it had sleeve art to match, created by Donwood and Yorke scanning and digitally collaging a trove of found images—”from old textbooks, brittle magazines from junk shops, what-to-do-in-emergency cards taken from aeroplanes, out-of-date manuals, piles of old photographs,” per Donwood.

“They were literally sitting at the computer together. One person would have a go and then the other would have a go, erasing things or changing things,” Fritsch explained of the creative process that would come to define Donwood and Yorke’s practice.

The exhibition includes test prints from the project—jarring combinations edged by bleached streaks. They appear portentous and disjointed, but purposefully so. At that time, the look of the album “stuck out like a sore thumb,” Donwood said. “But then there were loads of things that looked like it afterwards.”

Notebooks and Faxes

Turns out, not all is forbidding in Radiohead land. Donwood and Yorke’s collaboration is threaded with a sense of fun, revealed in previously unpublished notes, sketches, and writings they exchanged over the years. That collection of notebooks and correspondence numbered some 140 pieces, Fritsch said, of which a select number are on display. They offer “a feel of their relationship. It’s a very playful relationship, but at the same time it’s quite serious and very fruitful.”

Among them are faxed letters riddled with in-jokes, comic-like drawings, and a diagram of “Yorke’s worries.” Some of these doodles have even made it into Radiohead’s artwork, including the image of the sharp-toothed bear, now a mascot of sorts for the band; the humor has informed the band’s tongue-in-cheek marketing. Radiohead heads will also love the rare glimpse into Yorke’s notebooks, featuring his lyrics for songs including “Karma Police” and “Fitter Happier.”

The Disquieting Worlds of Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief

Though often printed in a 12-by-12-inch format, Donwood and Yorke’s original artworks for Radiohead’s album covers were created on larger—and more—canvases. They’re also rich with references to our political and social realities. For Amnesiac (2001), for example, the duo produced a series of monumental, sinister landscapes, shaped by newspaper images from the Yugoslav Wars. Created with brushes, knives, rags, and sticks, the works depict ghostly figures against isolated planes in scenes of barely contained violence.

The paintings for Hail to the Thief, on the other hand, take the form of urban maps filled in with neat, colorful typography. Inspired by the blaring billboards of Los Angeles, the works are composed with phrases plucked from the album’s lyrics and whatever happened to be in the air. They form unsettling yet hypnotic readings such as “Stand / Like Flies / Time Is Up / Blind.”

These references in Donwood and Yorke’s art are also a mirror held up to a moment, noted Fritsch, who also pointed out the pair’s early use of the Mac and a page in their notebooks that mentions Dolly, the cloned sheep. “They reflect the zeitgeist of different times,” she said, “of the times that they were made in.”

The Linocut Art of The Eraser

Besides Radiohead, the exhibition dedicates space to artworks devised for Yorke’s other musical projects, including Atoms for Peace and the Smile. Unmissable is the linocut Donwood created for the cover of his first solo record, The Eraser (2006). An extensive scene inspired by a 2004 flood in Cornwall, which the artists witnessed, it depicts London engulfed in dramatic waves, the city’s landmarks such as St. Paul’s Cathedral and the “Gherkin” being swept away. A lone figure stands with an arm outstretched, as if to hold back the waters.

Donwood’s original drawing for the cover, created in a style reminiscent of medieval woodcuts, is on view alongside the linoleum block fabricated for the project. The linocut concept was later developed for the cover of Amok, Atoms for Peace’s 2013 album, which captures Los Angeles amid an asteroid storm.

The Membranes Tapestry

Another medieval nod? A massive tapestry that reproduces one of Donwood and Yorke’s paintings from “The Crow Flies.” Created during the recording of the Smile’s Wall of Eyes, the suite of paintings was inspired by ancient maps and fittingly contained eerily textured topographies. The duo then experimented with transforming these canvases into textiles with help from Flanders Tapestries in Belgium. One of these, Membranes, now hangs in Ashmolean’s Music and Tapestry Gallery, offering what Fritsch called “a dialogue between the past and the present.”

It’s a striking sight—an arid terrain overwhelmed by an unwieldy blue form that’s filled in with curlicues and other wavy marks. Seen from afar, the work appears as an aerial map for a nonexistent landscape, made even stranger for being installed alongside a 17th-century tapestry depicting a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and historic musical instruments. It makes for a beguiling juxtaposition; chances are, Donwood and Yorke wouldn’t want it any other way.

“This is What You Get: Stanley Donwood | Radiohead | Thom Yorke” is on view at the Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford, the U.K., through January 11, 2026.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com