Exploring Radiohead Album Covers: Ashmolean Presents Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood’s Vision

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford presents This Is What You Get, running from August 6th, 2025 to January 11th, 2026, a sweeping exhibition devoted to the creative partnership of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood. More than 180 works are on display, from original Radiohead album covers to unpublished notebooks and paintings, tracing three decades of collaboration that shaped the band’s singular visual identity.

Stanley Donwood’s artworks: dark visions, stark landscapes

At the heart of the show is Stanley Donwood artwork that has become inseparable from Radiohead’s sound. Donwood and Yorke’s earliest experiments, including visuals for The Bends (1995), reveal their raw approach to image-making—grainy, pixelated, and deliberately imperfect. Later pieces, such as the haunting snowy landscapes of Kid A (2000), drew on war photography and hidden violence beneath layers of paint. Donwood’s linocut for Yorke’s solo debut The Eraser (2006) translates ecological catastrophe into graphic waves engulfing the familiar London skyline.

Album artwork as a mirror of music

The exhibition emphasizes how album artwork functions as more than packaging—it becomes an extension of Radiohead’s music itself. For OK Computer (1997), the artists set strict limits on digital tools, refusing to use the “undo” button, forcing every mistake to remain embedded in the image. The results capture the fractured tension of an album that defined an era. Later projects, such as The King of Limbs (2011), embraced nature with intricate studies of ancient trees, while A Light for Attracting Attention (2022) offered a surprising turn toward luminous, optimistic landscapes.

Stanley Donwood x Radiohead: a shared language

The partnership known as Stanley Donwood x Radiohead is one of the most enduring in music history. Yorke’s lyrical fragments, preserved in never-before-seen sketchbooks, intertwine with Donwood’s imagery to create a unified world where sound, word, and picture collapse into each other. From scrawled notebook lines to monumental canvases later woven into tapestries, the exhibition highlights the way their shared vision expanded across media—always restless, always experimental.

This Is What You Get ultimately shows how Radiohead’s music and its visual counterpart cannot be separated. As curator Dr. Lena Fritsch noted, the exhibition title—lifted from the band’s iconic track Karma Police—captures the spirit of Yorke and Donwood’s collaboration: honest, poetic, sometimes brutal, and often darkly comic. Visitors leave not just with memories of familiar Radiohead album covers, but with an understanding of the profound artistic dialogue that produced them.