Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood to show together at the Ashmolean

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has announced This Is What You Get: Stanley Donwood, Radiohead, Thom Yorke, an exhibition of more than 120 works by Yorke and Donwood that opens on 8 August 2025. The BBC gives the close as January 2026. Yorke's personal notebooks and sketchbooks, never shown in public, will hang beside the paintings.

The paintings, drawings and digital art go back to the 1980s, Donwood's Get Out Before Saturday included, and Radiohead's promotional images are in the show too. The Art Newspaper adds the faxes the two sent each other, work from Yorke's solo projects and The Smile, and three of the Minos Wall canvases. I can't paint portraits, I can't use oil and I'm not Gerhard Richter³, Donwood says.

Donwood, whose real name is Dan Rickwood, met Yorke at the University of Exeter. He has made Radiohead's artwork since the My Iron Lung EP in 1994, every album cover from The Bends on, and the art for Yorke's other projects, The Smile included. In 2002 the two shared the Grammy for Best Recording Package for the limited edition of Amnesiac, made up as a library book.

The title comes from “Karma Police”, and the museum is not far from Abingdon School, where the band formed in 1985.

The museum says the show is about the relationship between visual art and music. I always feel that record covers are the things that happen on street corners, or they used to be³, Yorke says.