Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood announce new London art exhibition
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood have announced a new London art exhibition.
The show, which is titled ‘The Crow Flies Part One’, is due to run at the Tin Man Art gallery at Cromwell Place in South Kensington between September 6-10.
It’ll feature a series of new paintings that long-term friends and collaborators Yorke and Donwood created together over the past two years.
Per a description, the works began as cover artwork for ‘A Light For Attracting Attention’, the 2022 debut album from Yorke’s side-project The Smile, whose line-up is completed by Radiohead‘s Jonny Greenwood and Sons Of Kemet‘s Tom Skinner.
“The wider series will be presented alongside a Flemish woven tapestry commissioned by the artists in London to celebrate the album’s one-year anniversary,” the official listing reads.
“This exhibition marks a significant moment in a 30-year artistic partnership for Yorke and Donwood, who worked on it together in Oxford and Brighton between 2021 and 2023. It takes its name from Ted Hughes’ poem Crow (1966-69), from which the band name The Smile is also derived, and draws inspiration from the Bodleian Libraries’ collection of Islamic pirate maps and 1960s US military topographic charts.
“The works comprise a mixture of gouache, tempera and powdered mushroom on canvas and feature an extensive language of signs and symbols developed by the artists and codified via supporting imagery.”
Tickets for the exhibition are available free of charge – you can book yours here.
Donwood has created the art for all of Radiohead’s albums and promotional materials since 1994, as well as all of Yorke’s solo records. His work has also become synonymous with the posters and merchandise for Glastonbury Festival.
Last November saw Donwood speak to NME about his long relationship with Radiohead and his hopes for the future of the band.
“For a long time, Thom and I would work alongside each other or almost despite each other,” he explained. “We’d work on the same thing for a while then we’d take turns on a picture. I’d usually win and take over and it became mine because he doesn’t have as much faith in his abilities as an artist as he does as a musician; which is fair enough because he is quite good at the old music!”
As for his favourite Radiohead or Yorke-related piece that he’s created, Donwood told NME: “I always prefer the latest thing, so I really like The Smile stuff at the moment. ‘In Rainbows’ was also quite nice because it was the opposite of what I was intending to do. I like how it all worked out in the end, even though it wasn’t going to.”
Yorke and Donwood showcased a series of collaborative works at a London exhibition called ‘Test Specimens’ in 2022.
Back in March, Radiohead drummer Philip Selway said that the band will release new material “of some sort” within the “next couple of years”.
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Tom Skinner
NME
