Donwood and Yorke's Radiohead art goes on show at the Ashmolean

This Is What You Get: Stanley Donwood, Radiohead, Thom Yorke opens at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford today, with more than 180 works from the pair's 30 years of art for Radiohead, Yorke and The Smile. The first room is a floor-to-ceiling wall of LP sleeves, racked like a record shop. Further in, among the notebooks, is Yorke's, with early drafts of “Karma Police”, the song the show takes its title from.

Yorke and Donwood met as students at Exeter University, and their art has been on the front of every Radiohead, Yorke and Smile album since The Bends. The museum calls this the first exhibition in a public gallery to bring that work together. It is Yorke's first museum show, which he has talked about to The Art Newspaper. Lena Fritsch, the Ashmolean's curator of modern and contemporary art, put it together with the two artists, and says the title fits them. It represents Stanley and Thom's creative approach: direct, honest, poetic, dark, and sometimes comedic.⁶

The show has grown since the museum announced it last November, when it promised more than 120 works. Adam Buxton narrates the audio guide. Last week the Ashmolean put up tear-off posters of Get Out Before Saturday, the 2000 painting that leads the show, in Brixton and on Brick Lane for passers-by to take home.

The hang runs in date order. Near the start are the paintings for the “My Iron Lung” sleeve and The Bends, whose cover began in the basement of Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital. The pair went there to film an iron lung, found it dull and filmed a resuscitation dummy instead; at home they photographed the footage off a television screen, which is where the pixels come from.

OK Computer was made on a computer with a rule of no “undo”, so mistakes had to be erased or painted over. Its starting point was a photograph of a Connecticut highway junction, taken from a hotel window on tour. With Kid A the two went back to paint on large canvases, some drawing on war photographs from the former Yugoslavia, with snowy landscapes laid over scenes of violence.

Yorke's notebooks hold pages of lyrics crossed out and written again, which he goes back to for ideas. The show ends with The Smile: the paintings for A Light for Attracting Attention, Wall of Eyes and Cutouts, made side by side on shared canvases in a small shed at Yorke's home during the pandemic.