Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood show the Kid A paintings at Christie's

How to Disappear Completely: Stanley Donwood x Thom Yorke, a free show curated by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, opened at Christie's in London on 9 October and runs until 15 October. At its centre are six large paintings by Donwood, dystopian landscapes made between 1999 and 2001 and close kin to the Kid A cover and sleeve. Drawings, lyrics and digital work from the same years hang around them.

The six paintings are also for sale in Christie's online auction First Open: Post-War and Contemporary Art, where bidding runs from 5 to 19 October and estimates start at £10,000 a painting. Christie's ties the show to Kid A Mnesia, the reissue Radiohead announced in September for 5 November.

In a statement for the show, Donwood remembers a very late night alone with Yorke in Oxfordshire, trying to finish the Kid A artwork. They had made too many pictures and had many versions of the front cover, each with its own picture, title and typeface, and they were too tired to choose. We couldn't work out which was the right one so we took them all downstairs and used tape to stick them to the cupboards and the fridge in the kitchen¹. They hoped the morning would make the choice obvious, and Donwood ends the story with the title it gave them, Kid A.

Donwood has told Christie's that he was asked to move into the studio while Kid A was being recorded, so that the paintings could answer the mood of the album as it grew. Some of their darkness was his own. The war in the former Yugoslavia and its death tolls weighed on him, and the paintings were about a cataclysmic power in the land. On the computer they folded the geology in on itself and stretched the mountains and gorges, then filled the scenes with pylon-like creatures come to life and stalking, half-finished cartoon giants, floating red cubes and swimming pools of blood hanging in the air.

On the eve of the opening Radiohead posted a film of almost nine minutes on their YouTube channel, “Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood in conversation for Christie's”. The two talk about working together and tell the story of several of the original paintings, later reworked on the computer into the album's artwork. They met as students at Exeter University, and Yorke remembers sizing Donwood up. I'm either really going to hate this bloke or I'm going to end up working with him forever.⁷

Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood in conversation for Christie's· Radioheadwatch on youtube →