This Is What You Get
Client: Ashmolean Museum
We are delighted to have designed the hugely successful temporary exhibition This Is What You Get for the Ashmolean Museum, celebrating the remarkable creative collaboration between Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and visual artist Stanley Donwood.
Incorporating over 180 objects—from original paintings to digital compositions, etchings, unpublished drawings and lyrics—our design celebrates the pair’s 30‑year friendship and artistic partnership, and the distinctive visuals they have conjured for every Radiohead album since The Bends, as well as Yorke’s solo outings.
Our scheme translated the pair’s desire to foreground the art over the music, in a spirit of irreverence and accessibility through a mix of white cube minimalism, artist studio and eclectic record shop aesthetics. The latter pays tribute to the fans who have become collectors of their art over the decades in a discreet space with floor‑to‑ceiling albums, T‑shirts and posters.
The most impressive space is the central, triple‑height gallery, where walls are double‑stacked with the duo’s large, square, original canvases, featuring their prolific output - paintings chosen as covers as well as for sleeve art and associated merchandise.
Supporting original materials that demonstrate the duo’s processes and experiments are arranged in bespoke display case tables, positioned to avoid excess visual clutter. Strategic listening posts invite both fans and newcomers to experience how the visuals reflect and enrich the band’s distinctive sound. The overwhelmingly glowing reviews concluded that the pair’s visual output more than stands on its own merits, with The Times calling it “an intense aesthetic and psychological experience”.
Our role:
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Exhibition design
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Interpretive masterplanning
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Content development
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Overseeing installation
Images: © Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
