Radiohead museum exhibition in 2025

“This is What You Get: Stanley Donwood, Radiohead, Thom Yorke” is the first museum exhibition dedicated to the English band Radiohead and will open in 2025 at the Ashmolean in Oxford. The exhibition is dedicated to the band’s iconic visual identity by writer and artist Stanley Donwood, with whom they have collaborated since 1994. The first album they worked on together was The Bends, the group’s second album. Their creative partnership was successful, with Donwood going on to create each of the covers for subsequent Radiohead albums. In 2025, his creative process will be revealed in an art exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford titled “This is What You Get: Stanley Donwood, Radiohead, Thom Yorke,” which will be hosted from August 8, 2025 to January 11, 2026. “This is What You Get,” the first public exhibition of its kind to be held in a museum, will not only showcase the finished album covers, but also the work that went into their conception, including unused compositions, unpublished drawings and never-before-seen song lyrics taken directly from Donwood’s sketchbooks. Over time, Donwood came to be seen as part of the band, including helping to create the Radiohead website that has become an important part of the group’s identity, as well as the covers of Yorke’s solo material.
Donwood’s creations have since become as iconic and recognizable as his music, being reproduced and framed by young people around the world. Next year, another exhibition paying homage to an artist who made “revolutionary contributions to art”, according to the Ashmolean, is “Anselm Kiefer: Early Works”, a foray into the formative years of German artist Anselm Kiefer, a leading figure of the New Symbolism and Neo-Expressionist movements, whose paintings chronicle significant events in German history.