Two Kid A-era paintings now carry Thom Yorke's name beside Donwood's

Two paintings from 2000, Get Out Before Saturday and Hotels and a Swimming Pool, were until now credited to Stanley Donwood alone. They now carry Thom Yorke's name as well, and both hang in This Is What You Get, the pair's exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which opens on 6 August.

Talking to Anny Shaw of The Art Newspaper on the eve of the opening, Yorke still calls his part in many of the older works supervisory. Donwood disagrees. We would both work in front of the same canvas, taking turns until someone won, which was usually me.¹ Yorke has never felt confident as a visual artist, and says so in the exhibition catalogue. I don't think I've got any particularly good technique or anything; I'm painfully aware of my limitations.² Lena Fritsch, the Ashmolean's curator, tells MOJO that Donwood is the stronger technician and Yorke the more interesting on concept.

Yorke calls a museum show a big step, and very odd. This one covers the sleeves from The Bends on, with sketchbooks never shown before and recent paintings, and runs until 11 January.

They met as art students at the University of Exeter in the late 1980s. The partnership began in 1993, when Yorke, unhappy with the label's generic sleeve for Pablo Honey, asked Donwood to work on the next record, and the first thing they did was go through the racks at HMV in Oxford. For The Bends they got into the John Radcliffe Hospital to photograph an iron lung, found it dull, and Donwood photographed a resuscitation dummy in a dim room instead.

The Kid A sessions began in a Paris studio in a former cinema, and Donwood switched to canvases too big to reach across. Neither had painted since art school; Yorke calls going back to it absolutely terrifying. Donwood spread Artex on with a palette knife, and Yorke reworked the scans on screen.

After the lockdowns they painted the canvases for The Smile side by side in a shipping container in Yorke's garden, set off by an exhibition of medieval Arabic maps at the Bodleian Library. Painting is now the priority, Yorke says, and Donwood expects them back in the studio in the autumn once the show stops taking everything. Lockdown gave Yorke whole weeks to paint away from the recording studio, and he has struggled to come back from it. I really valued that time, and it's hard to come back to whatever that was.¹