Stanley Donwood has been Radiohead‘s signature album artist since 1994. Having never strayed from them since the “My Iron Lung” EP, Donwood’s logos and art for the band has become an essential icon of our culture, his work often depicting a bleak dystopia and consumerist commtary that has become the group’s calling card.
Aside from his work directly for the band, he has contributed to different members’ solo projects, most notably the sprawling foldout design featured on Thom Yorke‘s 2006 solo album, “The Eraser.” That drawing, entitled “London Views,” showed England’s capital city engulfed in a mass flood, fitting in with Yorke’s frequently voiced concerns about the dangers of global warming and pollution (views that Donwood obviously shares himself).
Donwood has now constructed a full-scale sequel to that illustration. The L.A. based gallery Subliminal Projects is hosting a new exhibit which will include a new 18-foot print depicting the destruction of Los Angeles by way of fire, floods, and meteor shower. Called “Lost Angeles,” the installation will also include Donwood’s “London Views” drawing as well as another similar depiction he made in 2008 called “Fleet Street Apocalypse.”
The process of making the “Lost Angeles” piece was pretty time consuming as well, consisting of hand chiseled linoleum panels that were then burnished onto Japanese Kozo paper. Curiously enough, one of the panels features the Capitol building swallowed up in waves, the label once being Radiohead’s US home.
The exhibit will be on display at Subliminal Projects until May 26.
