Logical Absurdity is the latest exhibition from a 30-year artistic collaboration between Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, presented by Tin Man Art. For decades, the pair have worked in tandem, creating a vast archive of visual material for Radiohead’s album covers, books and internet projects in an evolving visual narrative. More recently, they have started painting together, co-creating works on canvas, loosely in the genre of landscape, and laterally tapestries, in a departure from previous subject matter. This exhibition comprises a series of screen prints, linocuts, lithographs and new acrylic paintings by Donwood (the man behind Radiohead's signature, yet ever-evolving, visual aesthetic), a suite of co-authored paintings and tapestries by Yorke and Donwood, and a painting by Yorke.
The exhibition is a creative journey through analogue mediums in an increasingly digital world. Previously, their collaborative output was darker in tone, starker in figuration. On the cover of ‘Fear Stalks the Land! (A Commonplace Book)’ which gathers faxes, notes, fledgling lyrics, sketches, scribbles and lists sent between Yorke and Donwood from 1999 – 2000 during the creation of Kid A and Amnesiac, rows of identical cat faced, cross mouthed figures sit in a theatre of absurdity. “The creatures,” said Yorke, “really felt like the abstracted, semi-comical, stupidly dark false voices that battled us as we tried to work.” This output, which Donwood referred to as ‘the steampunk engine’ was essentially tethered to Radiohead’s sound, “all I had to do was find a way of extracting what the music looked like from the music.”
Much like OK Computer, their earlier work expressed an anxiety about our increasing dependence on the digital world, and the insidious nature of electronic footprints. Technology infiltrates every aspect of our lives at the most granular level, offering endless creative opportunities; and yet, the ‘web’ is hidden; our output is stored in a ‘cloud’ (endless miles of data storage centres hidden in sheds) and platforms harvest our data… What we create digitally is intangible and inherently vulnerable; it can disappear with the flick of a switch.
Then something happened, and it had everything to do with the real world. During the countless hours forced upon us us during lockdown, Yorke and Donwood turned back to the physical world. “The act of sitting down in front of a landscape and just trying to represent that in whatever way we felt – choosing to listen to that and not any of the shit in your head – was a massively freeing experience,” Yorke said. This shift led to a series of paintings that began as cover art for A Light for Attracting Attention (2022), the debut album from Yorke's rock band The Smile. What emerged was something wildly different in nature: vivid landscapes conceived in a mixture of gouache, tempera and powdered mushroom on canvas. Featuring a coda of signs and symbols, drawn from lyrics, they co-created a place where the land is sentient, the mountains have eyes, and water is a tapestry of swirling patterns lapping at the edges of everything. Their earlier critique of society and technology evolved into something new. “I was just wandering around, drawing what I saw,” Yorke said. What they saw was the natural world: seasonal tones, open skies, and landscapes imbued with a sense of renewal.
The pair created their first set of large-scale paintings—six feet square—in a cold warehouse in Bath and a freezing barn in Oxfordshire, working side by side. The imagery became topographical, a kind of meta-mapping. This new world wasn’t an illustration of music, but a universe born from two minds collaborating in real-time. Stepping away from the digital, they embraced natural, ‘old fashioned’ materials – painting their way forwards in a sort of analogue version of Minecraft. In this, they document a journey of restoration - where hope springs, and rivers flow into ultramarine lakes that shimmer under a gloriously beaming sun. There is joy and sensuality; instead of darkly drawn ‘mass amnesia mass hysteria’ ghouls and bears, we have magical landscapes, pulsing with colour and light.
Yorke and Donwood became interested in how land is represented imaginatively. Inspired by the aesthetics and symbolism of topographical maps held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, from 17th century Persian nautical maps, to military maps from WWII, they noticed that there was always a unifying theme and coda. Initially, the lyrics served as the source for map’s legend (the box that explains the symbols). Like with Kid A, Amnesia they created almost 30 small drawings of objects or things mentioned in the songs.
As their process evolved, they moved away from traditional notions of mapping. In exploring this shared space, their alphabet of lyrical symbols was discarded or buried in layers of paint. Meanwhile, their interest in materials evolved; they began to draw on historic techniques of oil tempera on vellum, and this transformed their work. Colours grew richer, marks became more fluid, and dynamic resulting in paintings like Two Moons (2023) and Let Us Raise Our Glasses To What We Don't Deserve (2023). Consciously or not, they were also exploring the fugitive nature of image making, and the existential question of legacy: will any of our creations stand the test of time?
“I am really interested in the life of an image and the idea of repetition, and how what we create takes on a life of its own and is reproduced across a whole spectrum of media,” says Donwood. Logical Absurdity includes an extremely large linocut print, which is a mutated continuation of The Crow Flies series of paintings. Rattus Volcanicus (2024) on Somerset velvet soft white paper, 300gsm, is remarkable for its almost medieval colour palette of vivid IKB blue and 23.5 ct gold leaf. IKB is an iconic pigment; in 1960 the artist Yves Klein had registered the paint formula as International Klein Blue and used it with abandon. However, years later, the ingredients were found to be carcinogenic. Adam of Paris created a safe version of IKB, “which you can now buy in a tub in Montparnasse” says Donwood. In this image, rats scurry through the quasi-Medieval linocuts and beneath volcanoes. “I figured out how to carve volcanic eruptions in a quasi-Medieval style…”
Like Donwood’s 2017 series Economic Possibilities, also made in a quasi-medieval style, these worksseem to speak to the idea of an urban maze, and ‘les petits rats’ (our children) we train to run around in circles. There are edges, delineated by the paper, but the use of repeating patterns suggests that something is going beyond, and it might manifest in the next frame. There is a powerful continuation to the darker themes of earlier works, but also, by incorporating a medieval style, we are reminded of the dark ages, which laterally speaks to our present conundrum: by disappearing into the web of misinformation, we are losing our knowledge of the real world. This notion seems to be punctuated in a small work by Yorke, if i ever get out (2024), in mixed media.
Donwood has also created two new paintings for this show Dark Forces, 2024, and A Lesser Evil, 2024. We see a cluster of denuded, purple spikes, set into deep cadmium yellow earth that foregrounds white mountain peaks. There is a sharpness to the scene, enhanced by the rich contrast of fauvist colours; into the yellow, swirling rivulets of ultramarine coruscate and gather into lakes. Biomorphic, arterial, more than representations of landscape, there are no figures in this scene, but somehow, we feel a human presence – as if we have been given access to a realm deep within his psyche.
Unlike these solo pieces, Yorke and Donwood’s collaborative works resemble a dance, each artist responding to the other’s steps. The work is completed, when the unspoken, hidden narrative they are working to – like a tune – finishes. In Let Us Raise Our Glasses To What We Don't Deserve (2023), in tempera, gouache, and gesso on linen a vibrant orange orb occupies the centre of a lucent green field. It captures something fantastical, as if the sun has chosen to stay beyond its time of setting, in homage to the verdant landscape, shimmering with life. The painting radiates positivity, offering a counterpoint to the more familiar narrative of climate catastrophe. Here, the sun is not a threat but a symbol of renewal and hope.
These co-authored landscapes seem to articulate a possibility that, in collaboration, we have the power to bring about any change we can imagine. The act of co-creation is not just a deeply human one but could be seen as an ecological manifesto—where our tactile relationship with the material world holds the key to potential solutions. According to the neuroscientist Emma Critchlow, in ‘Joined-Up Thinking: The Science of Collective Intelligence and Its Power to Change Our Lives’, we have become too used to thinking of intelligence as the private skill of individuals, pitched against one another in the relentless competition of capitalism. As we engage with our “collective intelligence”, we begin to weave the threads of a new world together.
Laterally, this synchronistic process also birthed a new, unexpected format: five Flemish-woven tapestries based on paintings. After Donwood visited the thousand year old Bayeux Tapestry, he became fascinated with storytelling through weaving. “There are at least three stories happening at the same time on that strip of cloth. It seems almost so modern - it takes about the same amount of time to look properly at as it would do to watch a feature film.” The first two tapestries A Woven Wall of Eyes, and Besuch (in stitches), were exhibited in a two-part exhibition 'The Crow Flies', by Tin Man Art. In Logical Absurdity we have the paintings Goom, Membranes, and Somewhere you'll be there, (all 2023), represented as tapestries. If you reached out and touched them, they would not unravel. There is a thrilling, tactile permanence to these works, which will outlive us all. They tell a story of something wondrous for generations to come.
Nico Kos Earle
September, 2024
- Emma Critchlow: Joined-Up Thinking: The Science of Collective Intelligence and Its Power to Change Our Lives is published by Hodder & Stoughton
