The artist behind Radiohead‘s Kid A cover art has discussed his creative process and what influenced his work on the album.
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Stanley Donwood – along with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke – is co-curating a new artwork exhibition in London based around the band’s forthcoming reissues of Kid A and Amnesiac.
Taking place October 5 to 19, the exhibition – dubbed How To Completely Disappear – will be held at Christie’s headquarters.
Speaking to Christie’s about his work with Radiohead, Donwood revealed some of the influences that inspired the album covers and how the creative process unfolded.
“It’s quite rare for a band to be as interested in their visual representation as the music,” Donwood said of the band’s interest in the physical presentation of their album.
He explained he was invited to move into the studio during the recording of Kid A so that his paintings might “respond to the developing mood of the album”.
Donwood is selling six large-scale paintings he created for Kid A at the upcoming exhibition, alongside drawings, lyrics, and digital art made around this era in the band’s history. The series of dystopian landscapes were made in the period 1999-2001, and closely related to the final cover and sleeve art for Kid A.
We are thrilled to partner with @radiohead @thomyorke to present artworks by @StanleyDonwood who has created the cover art for #Radiohead's ground-breaking albums since The Bends in 1996. The paintings will be offered this October in First Open: Post-War and Contemporary Art. pic.twitter.com/MSOaR7lTYh
— Christie's (@ChristiesInc) September 20, 2021
Asked about the dark nature of some of the paintings, Donwood said it had a lot to do with how he was feeling at the time.
“I had a lot of things on my mind to do with the ongoing conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and the death tolls,” he explained. “It was about some sort of cataclysmic power existing in the landscape.”
Yorke has previously said that he and Donwood were “obsessed with triangular mountains” and “had visions of pyramids flying over us”. Donwood elaborated further.
“We started to use the computer to collapse geology into itself and to exaggerate mountains and gorges,” Donwood said, “to populate the landscape with stalking creatures like pylons that had come to life, with half-completed cartoon behemoths and floating red cubes, aerial swimming pools of blood.”
A triple album KID A MNESIA reissue will be released by Radiohead via XL Recordings on November 5.
Two art books by Yorke and Donwood cataloguing the visual works created during the Kid A / Amnesiac era will also be published on November 4.