{"id":49161,"date":"2025-08-07T01:01:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T01:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/49161\/"},"modified":"2025-08-07T01:01:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T01:01:07","slug":"thom-yorke-shows-radiohead-album-art-in-first-museum-exhibit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/49161\/","title":{"rendered":"Thom Yorke Shows Radiohead Album Art in First Museum Exhibit"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhen Thom Yorke<\/a> and the rest of Radiohead<\/a> signed their first record deal in 1991, Yorke found himself feeling \u201cembarrassment\u201d at leaving his training as a visual artist behind in favor of \u201cmaking music, sound, and words,\u201d he tells <\/a>The Art Newspaper in a new interview. After he ended up disliking the album cover to the band\u2019s debut, Pablo Honey<\/a>, he sought out a classmate, Stanley Donwood, and began a decades-long collaboration on album art. Their work is featured at Oxford\u2019s Ashmolean Museum, in Yorke\u2019s first-ever institutional exhibit, starting this week and running until January 2026.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis is What You Get displays their complete catalog of record cover designs, unseen sketchbook pages, and recent paintings. For Yorke, it\u2019s a reclamation of his original artistic identity.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s an odd thing to go to art school,\u201d Yorke tells the Art Newspaper. \u201cAll the way through you\u2019re told you\u2019re going to be an artist but when you leave you think, clearly you\u2019re not going to do this for a career, because no one does that. And then you go into this weird limbo.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe duo were experimental from the start, creating the cover of The Bends by degrading images \u2014 taking video footage of a developed photo of a CPR dummy and rephotographing it from a television, then repeating the process.\u00a0 The digitally created cover for OK Computer was built around a photograph of a Connecticut highway intersection taken from a hotel window on a Radiohead tour stop. Yorke says in the interview that the art reflects his mental state at the time as much as the album does: \u201cI\u2019d been living in a bubble for a very long time, touring endlessly and feeling like everything was moving too fast. It was a little bit out of control.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tStarting with Kid A, Yorke and Donwood went back to physical painting, on oversized canvases. Returning to that medium was \u201cabsolutely terrifying,\u201d Yorke tells The Art Newspaper. \u201cWe weren\u2019t even painting for the sake of painting. We were painting to build texture, things that we would then scan.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRadiohead hasn\u2019t recorded an album since 2016\u2019s Moon-Shaped Pool, but Yorke has stayed wildly productive, dropping scores for 2018\u2019s Suspiria and 2024\u2019s Confidenza,\u00a0 the solo album Anima, three albums with the Smile<\/a>, and most recently, Tall Tales, a collaboration<\/a> with electronic musician Mark Pritchard. He also embarked on his first-ever truly solo tour last year, playing music from across his career alone on stage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Thom Yorke and the rest of Radiohead signed their first record deal in 1991, Yorke found himself…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49162,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,136,41823,41824,41825],"class_list":{"0":"post-49161","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-radiohead","13":"tag-the-smile","14":"tag-thom-yorke"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}