Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood show new drawings in Venice

Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood's exhibition No Go Elevator (not without no keycard) opened on 7 May at Castello 2432, on the Fondamenta dei Penini in Venice, and runs until 7 June. It is the pair's first show outside the UK, put on in the opening week of the 61st Venice Biennale with Tin Man Art, the London gallery where they showed The Crow Flies in 2023.

There are 15 works: 14 drawings in walnut ink on Japanese mulberry-bark paper and one large painting in tempera and gold leaf on linen. They hang in a former townhouse lobby that Donwood reckons is about three metres high, four wide and five long. There is no press release and no artist statement, only a poster with the dates, the address and a handwritten column of words, and a website that pairs each picture with its words.

Before the opening Yorke told Artnet that after years of being dragged back through old work, the Ashmolean retrospective in Oxford among it, they wanted to show something new without any context, and that they are still struggling to find a language for it. There is no unifying theme, no concept.² Donwood says nearly all of it was made this year, mostly in London, and that the words are half the work, though nobody needs to understand them.

The words come out of Yorke's notebooks, where he gathers the raw material for his lyrics. Donwood picked them out and put them in order, Yorke shuffled them again, and the titles and captions came out of the pile. He's like a park worker with a leaf-blower, but he's just blowing loads of words.⁴ Yorke told Plaster that the show's name goes back to a night in a bad hotel in Miami when, very drunk, he could not get his key card to let him in. It does not come from a lift in Atlanta, as a theory on Reddit had it.

The two pass each drawing back and forth, often in the evening in front of the television. In I have read, understood & agree to the terms, Yorke drew the kneeling figures and Donwood the things coming out of their heads. I'm not great on my own. I can do it, but I go around in circles.³

In the same interview Yorke was asked about the Biennale's politics. He said he agrees with Pussy Riot's protest and with the protests against Israel, and asked why Russia and Israel, both at war, should be there; America, he added, is at war too.

Donwood has had enough of looking back, after OK Computer's 20th anniversary, the Kid A and Amnesiac reissues and the Ashmolean. He wants to make new work and paint more with Yorke, and not on a computer. Asked whether the show might come to the UK, he said he hadn't thought about it, but it would fit in a shed.