Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood open Logical Absurdity in London

Logical Absurdity, a show of work by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, opened at Tin Man Art, 9 Cork Street in Mayfair, London, on 29 November and runs to 14 December. The show comes a week after the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford announced a larger exhibition of the pair's work.

Three of the paintings the two made together in 2023, “Goom”, “Membranes” and “Somewhere you'll be there”, hang here as weavings made in Flanders. Donwood took up the form after a visit to the Bayeux Tapestry, struck that it takes about as long to look at properly as a feature film.

There are at least three stories happening at the same time on that strip of cloth.

Stanley Donwood¹

They have had five pieces woven so far. The first two, “A Woven Wall of Eyes” and “Besuch (in stitches)”, hung in The Crow Flies at the same gallery.

The show holds more than 20 recent works. Donwood's very large linocut “Rattus Volcanicus” has rats running beneath volcanoes in a quasi-medieval style, printed in International Klein Blue with 23.5-carat gold leaf. Yorke has one painting of his own, “if i ever get out”, a small mixed-media piece from this year.

Their joint paintings began with the cover of The Smile's first album, A Light for Attracting Attention, in 2022. The first big ones, six feet square, were painted side by side in a cold warehouse in Bath and a freezing barn in Oxfordshire, from maps in Oxford's Bodleian Library that run from 17th-century Persian nautical charts to Second World War military maps. At first symbols taken from the lyrics made up the maps' legend; later the two buried them under paint, and moved to oil tempera on vellum for pictures such as “Two Moons”.

Asked by Apollo the day before the opening whether the two work well together, Donwood said he hoped so.

We've been collaborating for about 30 years; most of it seemed to make at least some sort of sense at the time.

Stanley Donwood²