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With a few glaring exceptions, Radiohead is known to have good taste when it comes to the people with whom its members choose to collaborate. Their music videos have been directed by Jonathan Glazer and Paul Thomas Anderson, for whom Jonny Greenwood has done several soundtracks, and Thom Yorke did the excellent score for Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 Suspiria remake, which had every possibility of being good in other regards as well. And who could forget Yorke and Greenwood’s appearance as themselves in the South Park episode “Scott Tenorman Must Die” (2001), mocking the villain for crying because Cartman had killed his parents?
A new show at the Ashmolean Museum, “This Is What You Get,” celebrates the band’s visual art for their albums and related materials. They have collaborated with artist Stanley Donwood on every album since their second, “The Bends” (1995), the cover of which features a CPR dummy that Yorke and Donwood discovered after they snuck into the basement of Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital. Ever since, Yorke and Donwood have been partners in all the band’s visual language, which is vast and complex. This homecoming exhibition features over 180 works—paintings, digital compositions, etchings, drawings and lyric sketches.
Radiohead makes peerless music, but the exhibition demonstrates the extent to which their stirring album covers have wrapped these songs in a universe, a vibe, perhaps even an ethos. Because the band has been so influential, it can be a chicken-and-egg question as to whether their artwork was ahead of its time or simply shaped public consciousness because of how widespread it became.
I would argue that it’s the former. Take the hollow-feeling, glitched-out landscape of OK Computer. This was created from a deep engagement with the moment: Yorke playing Tomb Raider (1996) in the studio with Donwood and noticing that when the scenery blurred due to memory errors, it was “the most beautiful thing we’ve ever seen.” The pair used an early Macintosh to design the cover, setting a rule for themselves that they could not undo any changes they made. The end result is a triumph. Not many people were making art like that in 1997. You’d have to compare it to the contemporary output by luminaries such as Julie Mehretu, Richard Prince and Christopher Wool.
Some like to say they stopped after “Amnesiac” (2001), but “Hail to the Thief” (2003) and “In Rainbows” (2007) can be said of the visuals. Hail to the Thief has a false-naive style of painting—similar to artists who have become wildly popular today, like Jane Dickson and Stanley Whitney—while the spilled wax of In Rainbows recalls Wolfgang Tillmans’s recent efforts to make photography more organic and abstract. In the catalogue, Donwood is most proud of the T-shirts from the In Rainbows tour. Radiohead’s practice is precise and holistic, and the results have proven them to be consistently ahead of the curve in almost every way.
“This is What You Get” is on view at the Ashmolean Museum through January 11, 2026.
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Dan Duray
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