Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood announce new London art exhibition

nme.com:

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.