There’s a rainbow in the courtyard of the Royal Academy, and it is part of something bigger. You are directed to walk under it. Suspended three metres above the ground, Ugo Rondinone’s THE SONG IS YOU forms an arc at the threshold of the Summer Exhibition, which means that to get inside, you pass through it. The rainbow becomes a condition of entry. It’s a simple idea that lands well.
Rondinone has been making rainbow poems since 1996. Thirty years of them now, seventeen in total, each one carrying a phrase, each phrase functioning as a kind of compressed feeling rather than a statement. The first, CRY ME A RIVER, came out of the AIDS crisis — or more precisely out of the silence that had settled over it by the mid-nineties, the way the dying had continued while the news had moved on. He was in his early thirties. He needed to make something that wouldn’t apologise. The rainbow was already doing symbolic work as a flag, visible at a distance, carrying history. He borrowed it and gave it words.
THE SONG IS YOU is the newest. The YOU in the title is doing a lot. Rondinone is direct about this: you are not the audience for the work, you are the work. The rainbow is only a colour until a body passes through it. That’s either a generous thing to say or a very precise one, and probably it’s both.
This London presentation is one part of a three-part constellation of Rondinone’s work, and the right one spread across the city in collaboration with the Royal Academy. The second part is fifty-four flags along Bond Street, each one a different sunrise or sunset derived from watercolour paintings he’s been making since 2016. The flags move with the wind, and the light changes them. As a pedestrian experience, it’s quietly disorienting, in the way that encountering genuine public art always is: you’re walking somewhere, and suddenly you’re also somewhere else, passing through a sequence of skies. The series is called LIGHT, which is either obvious or earned depending on how you feel about Rondinone’s tendency toward the elemental.
The third part pulls inward. MORE LIGHT, installed in the gallery, brings six of the watercolour sunrise and sunset paintings into an intimate room. Unprimed cotton. A pencilled horizon. Loose colour washes with open edges. The simplicity is the point. These are images that exist somewhere between appearing and fading, which Rondinone talks about in terms of light as a psychological condition rather than just a visual one. It holds presence and disappearance at once, he says, like breathing.
Together, the three parts trace a movement: from the body, to the street, to something quieter and more interior. Threshold to city to consciousness. The vocabulary stays consistent across it all: rainbow, horizon, sky, sun, colour, light, and what shifts is the scale of address. The courtyard work speaks to the singular body crossing into an institution. The flags speak to the city moving past them. The paintings speak to whoever sits with them long enough.
Rondinone was born in Switzerland in 1964, studied in Vienna, and has lived and worked in New York since 1997. His exhibition history is long enough to constitute its own index — Versailles, Tate Liverpool, the High Line, the Rijksmuseum, Fondation Beyeler, and a full New York retrospective across multiple spaces in 2017. Forthcoming: Kiyomizu-dera Temple in Kyoto, and the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. The public spaces keep getting larger and more freighted with meaning. He seems comfortable with that weight.
Top Photo: P C Robinson © Artlyst 2026
MORE LIGHT runs at the Royal Academy from 16 June to 23 August 2026. The flags are up on Bond Street until mid-August. The courtyard rainbow is there for the duration. Walk under it.