Thom Yorke And Stanley Donwood Plot A Mysterious Art Show In Venice

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood bring their visual collaboration to Venice for the first time

A new exhibition by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood will open in Venice during the Venice Biennale, marking the pair's first show outside the U.K. Titled“No Go Elevator (not without no keycard),” the presentation will be on view at Castello 2432, Fondamenta dei Penini, from May 7 to June 7.

The exhibition includes new drawings and a large painting, much of it made in London in 2026. Yorke and Donwood have described the project as deliberately open-ended.“There is no unifying theme, no concept,” Yorke said, adding that what is omitted may matter more than what is included. Donwood, meanwhile, stressed the importance of the exhibition's text, saying that viewers who ignore the words will miss half the work.

That textual emphasis appears in the show's flyer, which strings together a bleak sequence of words and phrases:“joyless / pointless / senseless / worthless / loveless / what's best? / darkness / blindness / sleepless / thoughtless / witless / your mess.” The list reads almost like a lyric fragment, though the artists resist pinning it down to a single meaning.

The imagery follows a similarly unsettled register. The drawings feature delicate inkwork, sometimes marked by blots and Wite-Out, and depict the isolated, uncanny landscapes that have become central to Yorke and Donwood's shared practice. One work shows a lone figure emerging from a ziggurat-like structure surrounded by pipes expelling a white substance; another places the same looming ducts around a building haunted by a ghoul-like presence.

Yorke and Donwood's collaboration dates back to the 1990s, when they began creating cover art for Radiohead, the band fronted by Yorke. Their partnership, shaped by experimentation and a dry sense of humor, was recently surveyed in the Ashmolean Museum's 2025 exhibition“This Is What You Get,” which brought together more than 180 objects, including paintings, drawings, and correspondence.

That retrospective seems to have pushed the artists forward rather than backward. Yorke said they had spent too much time being pulled through earlier work and that looking back for too long can lead to a fall. In Venice, they are offering something more provisional: new work shown without context, and a chance for viewers to enter the middle of an ongoing conversation between image and language.

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