It was the morning after the night before and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and his friend, the artist Stanley Donwood were still trying to explain exactly what they’d done. The pair were in Venice, having just opened ‘No Go Elevator (not without no keycard)’, their first exhibition outside the UK, presented with TIN MAN ART. It is, of course, far from their first collaboration. More than 30 years after meeting as students at Exeter University, Yorke and Donwood first worked together on the cover artwork for The Bends in 1994. Since then, Donwood has gone on to create the artwork for every Radiohead record since, as well as Yorke’s more recent projects including The Smile. But it is only in recent years that the pair have begun making works side by side, collaboratively, in the studio.

Which is why, during the opening week of the Venice Biennale, a crowd of art world regulars (and, probably, more than a few diehards whose adolescence was soundtracked by OK Computer) gathered outside a small gallery space in Castello around a table serving vodka shots and Crodino. Inside were a mix of ink drawings and a large-scale painting on display in the gallery on the Fondamenta dei Penini until 7th June 2026.

The following morning, Annabel Downes caught up with the pair at Yorke’s hotel to discuss art school suits and firebreathing, the politics surrounding this year’s Biennale, and what makes bands fall apart.

Thom Yorke: Although we’re making our best effort right now, we were basically just going to tell you we don’t know what we’re doing.

Stanley Donwood: Venice felt like a nice place to put the work up without fully explaining it.

Annabel Downes: Which actually feels quite refreshing. I don’t imagine that’s something you hear very often this week. Fake it till you make it and all!

TY: ‘Fake it till you make it’ is basically all we learned at art school.

AD: Stanley, you were a firebreather when you and Thom reconnected after university, right?

SD: It’s a career dead end. And imagine trying to get a snog afterwards…

AD: Until Thom came along and saved you to work on The Bends. What made you want to bring him on?

TY: Honestly, it was probably the outfits. The suits.

SD: God, do you remember that smell from Oxfam suits? Moth balls and…

TY: B.O. Many, many hours of B.O. But anyway, while I was all over the place at art school, Stanley was always in the print studio. Also, unlike me, he could also talk himself out of trouble.

SD: I know, you still haven’t got it.

AD: The way you work together feels much closer to being in a band – riffing off each other – than what you normally see in the art world. Thom, have you always been making art alongside music?

TY: No, because I suffer from an acute lack of confidence.

SD: But you’re always making art despite that.

TY: Okay, that’s true. When we start hanging out, I come out of my shell. Weirdly, it’s the same in the recording studio – I’m not great on my own. I can do it, but I go around in circles. It’s always just more fun for it to be a conversation. Sometimes I genuinely don’t know what the fuck I’m doing until someone else is in the room.

SD: I hate working alone. It’s just boring. I also have a dreadful tendency to get even more neurotic and detailed in what I’m doing.

AD: I mean these works are pretty detailed. Esher-like. Roads leading to nowhere.

TY: Yeah, we were riffing off that. I don’t think it was a coincidence that we ended up fixating on maps. Everything kind of said: “How the fuck do I get out of here?” Christopher Nolan, as well. There’s that moment in Inception, the one with Leo, where the perspective of the city flips. Literally turns. I still don’t know how the fuck they did that.

SD: It’s a fantastic illusion. We often don’t know what mark is going to form. We just follow what the picture wants to do. I read somewhere about sculpture, that when people found a lump of marble, they were just revealing what was already inside it. We’ve got this iconography we’re trying to decipher at the same time as making it.

TY: I think the materials dictate things as well. The ink on Japanese paper behaves completely differently to paint on canvas.

SD: Yes, the paper’s made from mulberry bark and has these fantastically long fibres. If you’re drawing with a dip pen, the nib catches little obstacles in the paper and you get these hitches and blots.

TY: I do, anyway. I’ve got a high blot average.

SD: Which is usually the point where I start rummaging around for the corrective fluid.

TY: I still can’t believe you did that. Definitely not a Japanese tradition… But I suppose that’s where we’re at generally. We’re stuck in the middle of a lot of different things, and rather than pretend to be anything other than stuck in the middle, we’re just rolling with it.

SD: It’s too late to pretend to be confident or anything like that.

TY: It’s also too late to pretend that we’re an asset to be invested in by people who have made money from things we don’t agree with.

AD: I got stuck in the Pussy Riot protests outside the Biennale offices on the way here. They’d been protesting outside the Russian Pavilion yesterday.

TY: I mean it just speaks to the general political mayhem. But now we have this situation where genocide is occurring and wars are breaking out.

SD: Well I guess, when they started building these pavilions, the only countries that had the kind of cash to do that were usually the ones with empires.

TY: And the ones who were friends with Italy…

SD: Yes, that money didn’t come from nowhere. It came from centuries of moral dubiousness of one sort or another. But what’s good now is how much the whole thing has opened up. Some pavilions are these grand, purpose-built colonnaded buildings, while others are now popping up in temporary spaces around the city.

TY: Yes! Mongolia is fucking wicked, man.

SD: Cyprus too.

TY: Anyway, I totally agree with what Pussy Riot are doing, and with the protests against Israel. Russia and Israel are actively waging war, so why should they be here? But then America’s actively at war too. So where do you draw the line? How much responsibility do you place on ordinary citizens for what some raving lunatic is doing in the Middle East?

SD: A little bit of politics, ladies and gentlemen…

TY: Right, where were we? Moving on.

AD: There was a Reddit thread trying to decode the show’s title. One user was convinced it came from getting stuck in a hotel lift with you after a concert in Atlanta.

TY: God, there’s a Reddit page for everything. There was one about what bloody shoes I was wearing. But no, it was from a different time. I was absolutely fucking wasted in some terrible hotel in Miami and the key card wouldn’t let me in.

SD: All of the words in the show come from the same place Thom’s lyrics come from. Scraps, phrases, snippets of conversation.

TY: Some of which shouldn’t find their way into anything. Really bad.

SD: Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger were huge influences on us. I like that idea of words and pictures creating a third meaning together. There’s all this litter of words lying around. We had this huge pile of words and rhymes, all out of order, and slowly started rearranging them. Eventually we realised they should become the labels.

AD: After 30 years of working together, is there ever danger of the collaboration becoming too comfortable? That there’s no riffing left.

SD: I think what’s been good is when the band were making a record, each one felt like an entirely new project to me. Initially I tried to be a different person before each record. The idea was that no one would know it was the same person making them.

TY: I think the only way you can do it is you’ve got to be prepared to jettison when better ideas come along. And that’s what makes it exciting. If you stand there stamping your foot saying, “No, no, no, that’s not what I meant,” you’re fucked.

AD: And the band falls apart.

TY: Exactly.