Radiohead singer Thom Yorke and writer and artist Stanley Donwood have unveiled a new body of work in a solo show at Castello 2432 in Venice this week. Timed to the start of the 61st Venice Biennale, the show, titled "No Go Elevator (Not Without No Keycard)," brings together new ink drawings and a large-scale painting, the majority of which were executed in London earlier this year. It is the duo's first-ever exhibition outside the UK and will run through June 7.
Yorke and Donwood have collaborated for more than thirty years on original paintings for Radiohead album covers, lyric sketchbooks, and digital compositions. This exhibition, which is accompanied by a website, brings together fourteen walnut ink drawings on mulberry paper and one painting, which was executed in tempera and gold leaf on linen. The works are united by a visual language that employs stacked geometric towers, haunting orb-like entities, and liminal spaces reminiscent of the works of M. C. Escher.
I have read, understood & agree to the terms (2026), for instance, sees a row of these bulbous figures with antennae-like protrusions extending from their heads, cast upward as if plugging into something. It is accompanied by a text that reads, in part, "Let me refresh your glass! Go ask the unicorns! The mad king… no happy ending… Throwing knives reflect what you have in mind." Works such as Everything's Brilliant (2026), meanwhile, depict a landscape of these stacked towers while anonymous, shadowed figures approach, and The Voice from the Empty Chair (2026) and Numbers That You've Never Seen (2026) expand the contours of this visual world.
Details surrounding the show are intentionally vague. There is no press release, artist's statement, or information on the artworks. The exhibition poster offers only dates and an address, and is accompanied by a string of text scrawled in ink that reads like a poem, lyrics, or perhaps a track list: "joyless / pointless / senseless / worthless / loveless / what's best? / darkness / blindness / sleepless / thoughtless / witless / your mess."
In an email interview with Artnet News last month, the Radiohead frontman cryptically shared, "There is no unifying theme, no concept… What is left out is more important than what is included right now… what may appear simple has a whole forest of confusion behind it!" Added Donwood, "It is very important to look at the words, and if you do not, then you will have missed half of the work… However, it is not important to understand the words, so do not worry about that."
"No Go Elevator (Not Without No Keycard)" is the latest exhibition for the duo, who have collaborated on past shows, including a two-part exhibition in 2023 titled "The Crow Flies" at Tin Man Art in London, and "This Is What You Get," their first institutional show, held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The latter gathered more than 180 objects and ran from September 2025 through January 2026.
