Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood take No Go Elevator to Amsterdam

No Go Elevator (not without no keycard), the drawings Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood showed in Venice, is at Galerie De Schans in Amsterdam until 18 October. In Het Parool on 25 September the two told Edo Dijksterhuis where the work came from.

It began in 2022, when Donwood visited the East London studio where The Smile were recording their first album and brought his materials with him: gold leaf, black Japanese ink, walnut ink and mulberry paper. They drew because drawing makes less mess in a studio than painting. A drawing also cannot be painted over, so every slip stays in it.

These works show the history of our mistakes.

Thom Yorke¹

Donwood drew the buildings in the flat isometric projection, which he likens to Chinese and Japanese painting and to IKEA instructions. He says that with no perspective there is no depth, and so no time. Yorke added the figures, taken from people half seen in the background of webcam stills. Neither will call the work dystopian. Yorke points instead to the developers' hoardings around London that sell a future of laptops and coffee, and asks where people fit in it. The title is a line from one of his notebooks, written after a hotel lift refused his keycard once too often, and his short texts hang beside the drawings. They worked to murmuring voices on the radio and a lot of atonal music, where their earlier work had stayed close to Radiohead's records.

Yorke traces the series back to Kid A Mnesia, planned as an exhibition in 2021, which became an installation and a game when Covid ruled out a show. He calls that time one of pathological productivity, and this time they wanted something small. Donwood calls Amsterdam, like Venice, a low-key preview and says they hope to do something big next. Yorke says they will, once they know what it is.