Something cryptic is unfolding in Venice next month. Coinciding with the Venice Biennale, artists Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood will unveil a new body of work in a small gallery on the Fondamenta dei Penini—except details are elusive. What can we expect? “Your guess is as good as ours,” Yorke told me over email.
What we do know is that the exhibition is titled “No Go Elevator (not without no keycard)” and marks the duo’s first showcase outside the U.K. The space in Venice will be filled with a mix of drawings and a large painting. According to Donwood, the pieces were created largely in London this year. “Everything is new and nothing is old,” he added, helpfully.
The pair, however, did offer a glimpse of some drawings going on view. All feature delicate inkwork, occasionally speckled with blots and Wite-Out. They portray the unnerving, isolated terrains that have become Yorke and Donwood’s métier: one shows a lone figure emerging from a ziggurat-like structure surrounded by pipes spewing a white substance; another depicts the same looming ducts, now encircling a ghoul-haunted building.
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, . Photo courtesy of the artists and Tin Man Art.
“There is no unifying theme, no concept,” Yorke explained. “What is left out is more important than what is included right now… what may appear simple has a whole forest of confusion behind it!”
Donwood emphasized the exhibition’s textual component. Its flyer, for instance, bears a litany of words and phrases: “joyless / pointless / senseless / worthless / loveless / what’s best? / darkness / blindness / sleepless / thoughtless / witless / your mess.” It reads like a tracklist, or maybe not.
“It is very important to look at the words, and if you do not then you will have missed half of the work,” Donwood said over email. “However, it is not important to understand the words, so do not worry about that.”
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, . Photo courtesy of the artists and Tin Man Art.
Yorke and Donwood’s shared visual art practice came to the fore with their debut at London’s Tin Man Art gallery in 2023. Across two shows, the pair revealed disorienting vistas, populated by looming mountains, unruly bodies of water, and otherworldly forms, painted with water-based gouache and egg tempera. These paintings were created while the Yorke-led trio the Smile was recording its second album—bearing out a kind of “simultaneous composition,” Donwood told me at that time.
But the duo’s collaboration stretches further back to the ‘90s, when they began jointly masterminding cover artworks for Radiohead, which Yorke fronts. Their partnership, built on experimentation, subversion, and a sly humor, was spotlit at the Ashmolean Museum’s 2025 exhibition “This Is What You Get,” which brought together more than 180 objects including paintings, drawings, and correspondence spanning decades.
The retrospective seems to have awakened the artists’ urge to forge ahead with new work, Yorke intimated.
“We have spent quite a lot of time and effort in recent years being dragged back and forward through past work and that you cannot walk for too long with your head looking backwards,” he said. “At some point, you’ll fall down a hole or hit a lamppost.”
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, . Photo courtesy of the artists and Tin Man Art.
These latest pieces are so fresh, in fact, that Yorke and Donwood are still discovering them for themselves. We’ve just been invited along for the ride.
“This is a choice to show new stuff with no context. As always, we are struggling to find a language,” Yorke said. “I guess we liked the idea of people quietly walking/wandering into the middle of what is currently occupying our waking hours and thoughts.”
“It is a bit like discovering a new language by unearthing hidden artifacts,” Donwood added. “It all looks strangely ancient even though we just did it.”
“No Go Elevator (not without no keycard)” is on view at Castello 2432, Fondamenta dei Penini, Venice, May 7–June 7.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
