Stanley Donwood on his show with Thom Yorke in Venice: ‘These drawings… they’re not planned’

At home in Brighton, Stanley Donwood is looking forward to looking forwards.

The artist is still sorting the screeds of archive pieces that have been returned to him after January’s conclusion of ‘This Is What You Get’, Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum’s sprawling, five-month retrospective gathering his and Thom Yorke’s visual work together for Radiohead. ‘My studio is just full of boxes and stuff,' says the puckishly energetic artist, 57, a friend and collaborator of Yorke’s since their late 1980s days together at Exeter University. 'It’s really difficult. You have to move everything to move anything. Phew, I’ll get there in the end.'

There has been, too, the work on ‘Motion Picture House’, a Radiohead installation based partly on the visuals Donwood created for the paired albums, Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001). Having launched at California’s Coachella festival in April, it’s currently showing in Brooklyn.

'I haven’t seen it for real. I only saw sketches, mock-ups, then fancy computer fly-throughs of virtual environments. It’s its own little world,' he explains, born out of 'that digital exhibition-slash-game that’s not a game [we made] with Epic during the whole Coronavirus time. It’s the film of that, in this quite out-there installation with giant stick figures.'

Then there was the merchandise Donwood created for Radiohead’s surprise, don’t-call-it-a-comeback tour in autumn 2025. As it happens, when Donwood’s and Zoom call with me clicks into life, I’m wearing my T-shirt from the first show in Madrid. Awks-not-awks.

'Nice to see one in the wild!' says Donwood, chirpily. And nice to have a bespoke T-shirt specifically from that gig, I say. 'Yes, I do like doing different shirts for different shows. I was going to do that for every show when they did a tour some years ago. Then they expanded the tour. It became a nightmare of endlessly making new T-shirts, with different trees on them.'

Donwood is just back from Venice and the 2026 Biennale, returning the slow way with his partner. 'We got the train to Bologna, then walked to Florence. It was a lovely thing to do, to get all the Venice stuff out of my head.'

All the 'Venice stuff' was, at least in part, the excitement around ‘No Go Elevator (not without no keycard)’, Donwood and Yorke’s first exhibition, staged with Tin Man Art, outside the UK. It’s a collection of 15 pieces, ink on Japanese paper, that combine the pair’s mutually completed drawings and paintings with assemblies of the word scree that Donwood found in Yorke’s notebooks.

To highlight one image shown alongside this story, titled I have read, understood & agree to the terms, the text that appears underneath runs thus:

'Let me refresh your glass! Go ask the unicorns! The mad king… no happy ending… Throwing knives reflect what you have in mind. There’s a tranquilliser dart for you; keep a left turn at the exit. Pounded against unseen rocks without mercy, the wind and the tide, the ghost wide-eyed. (But with today’s new air-conditioning methods and extensive satellite connectivity.)'

And then, underneath that, 'The thisness of thatness.'

Wallpaper*: So, Mr Donwood: what’s the this-and-that that made the Venice Biennale the right place for you and Mr Yorke to ‘tour’ your work for the first time?

Stanley Donwood: Ahhhhhhh…. The right place? I don’t know what the right place would be. But this is a really tiny exhibition in a really small space: three metres high, four metres wide and five metres long. It’s basically a small box. But it’s got a posh door. It must have been once the entrance to quite a big townhouse. But it’s just the lobby, small and plain. And Venice as a place to do a show? Why not? There are loads of people who are into art there. Let’s hit them up.

W*: When we spoke last summer, Thom said you would be getting back into the painting studio in the autumn. Are these the works that resulted?

SD: Yes. We did a load of work in October, then more earlier this year. It was all done over the course of two months in total. It was nice to just paint. I’m a bit fed up with computers. I mean, they’re kind of useful. But I’m very bored with computers and the internet. I was really keen in the 1990s and early 2000s on everything digital. But it's soured a bit for me. The unintended consequences of the internet, really. Who’d have thought it would lead to a massive global rise in Nazis? I didn’t see that coming. I thought it was gonna be great!

W*: These painting studios – where are they?

SD: Some of it was here [in Brighton, UK]. But also, Thom’s got a new studio, in London town. So I’ve been going up to work there. We do a lot of work in the same studio, but also over the phone – taking photos of things and saying [to each other]: ‘What should I do next? I’m stuck.’

W*: With this exhibition, were the materials – ink on Japanese paper – a founding principle of what these pieces would be?

SD: When we were doing the paintings that became the artwork for [Yorke’s side-project] The Smile, back in 2022, we were using tempera paint, which is very beautiful. And at the same time, we got interested in Japanese painting and how that’s done. So we ended up using this ink made from walnuts, and the paper is Japanese, made from another tree, the bark of the mulberry. It has lovely, long fibres for making paper.

W*: The image that’s titled I have read, understood and agree to the terms: I’m describing that as seven blobby people on their knees, with their hands behind their backs, looking like… they’re about to be hanged. What was the inspo?

SD: With swapping the paintings back and forth, we do the drawing in the evening, usually in front of the telly. Draw a bit, pass the drawing over to the other guy, and it goes backwards and forwards like that. So Thom drew the sitting figures. And I drew those things coming out of their heads. They’re not supposed to be [being] hanged. But I guess they do look a bit like that. Depends on what’s in your mind, really. I think they were supposed to be thoughts coming out of their heads. But now you mention it, they do look a bit sinister.

W*: Then we have Numbers That You’ve Never Seen – an open-topped, stepped, Mayan temple, I’m going to suggest.

SD: There are loads of paintings in that style. They’re like ziggurat structures. There are so many little reasons things are like what they are. But I find if I try to explain it, it sounds like a garbled load of nonsense. Because by the time [the work] comes out, it is a bit garbled.

With these drawings, they’re not really… considered. They’re not planned. They don’t have a start point and an endpoint. They’re the result of an evolving and unfinished thought process. They’re partly from half-remembered dreams. Mis-remembered dreams, really.

So the pictures are one thing. Then there are the words which go with them, which I think are half of the work…

W*: Ah yes. How do you come by those?

SD: Those come from going through Thom’s [writings]. When Thom’s working on music, he collects loads of words. He’s like a park worker with a leaf-blower, but he’s just blowing loads of words. He ends up with this massive load of words that he then picks through to find lyrics.

So I got all of the words he had, all these pages of writing – well, words really. You can’t call it writing because it isn’t yet, it’s the raw material. So I went through it, picked out what I liked, reordered it, sent that back to Thom and he reordered it again. And from the reordering of the reordering, we extracted sequences of words that looked like titles of paintings.

W*: Was this alongside doing the paintings?

SD: This happened at a different time to making the drawings and paintings. So you’ve got this picture and you apply words to it. You give it a title, then you put some other words where normally a painting in a museum would have a description underneath of what it is.

So it makes a different thing. We might have been thinking one thing when we’re painting a picture, another thing when we’re putting the words together. But when you look at the picture and read the words at the same time, we’ve made another thing that we didn’t plan.

That’s as close to a… ah… process as I can get. It sounds awful! Maybe it’ll sound better when you write it down.

W*: We’ll let Wallpaper* readers be the judge of that… Anyway, the exhibition title: ‘No Go Elevator (not without no keycard)’. Thom’s said that that’s a reference to a time he was ‘absolutely fucking wasted in some terrible hotel in Miami and the key card wouldn’t let me in’. Any further intel on that?

SD: I don’t know. I wasn’t there at the time when he lost his keycard. He’s probably had quite a lot of keycards in his time. But, yeah, it’s the sort of thing you can lose, I guess. Actually, I was in a hotel in Zurich the other day and you had to use your keycard to get up in the lift. And I did have a keycard and the elevator was going. I felt like a success.

W*: What might that title convey?

SD: Again, I don’t know. We’ve got this bizarre, meaningless title, but it just sounded quite nice. It looked great as a website too. So we’ve got nogoelevator.com. Which for some reason no one had. It’s a brilliant dot.com. And on that, each picture has its words associated with it.

Weirdly, even though the words and the pictures don’t mean anything by themselves, it still took us ages, and a lot of toing and froing, to work out which title goes with each drawing. I don’t know why. But once they were stuck, we thought: ‘Well, of course that picture's called that. What else could it be called?’

I like that sort of thing. The accidental creation of sense from nonsense.

W*: The exhibition runs until early June. Will you then bring it to the UK?

SD: Oooh! I hadn’t thought of that. I… don’t know. I’ll mention it to my agent. But that’s a really good idea. Because we wouldn’t need much space, so the rent would be quite cheap. We could use a Portakabin or shipping container. We don’t even need that. We could do it in a shed to be honest.

W*: Any other new projects with Thom?

SD: We’re going to try to do some more painting soon. But for me and Thom, it’s been a lot of backward looking. There was the 20th anniversary of OK Computer in 2017. Then all this Kid A and Amnesiac stuff. The show at the Ashmolean. It’s like, everything’s back there [cranes head behind him]. You get a crick in your neck after a while. Looking through old things, I don’t think it’s very healthy. So I just want to do new stuff – not on the computer. Computer not OK!

‘No Go Elevator (not without no keycard)’ is at Castello 2432, Fondamenta dei Penini, 30122, Venice until 7 June 2026, veneziatiamo.eu