Artist’s statement on his courtyard installation

Rainbows have followed me for 30 years. They are celebratory. They are optimistic. They are also the shape grief takes when it refuses to disappear.

In 1996, the AIDS crisis had not ended. It had simply ceased to be news. The dying continued quietly, privately, shamefully. I was a gay man in my early thirties. I needed to make something that could not be ignored, something that would stand in a public space and refuse to apologise for existing. The rainbow was already a symbol of survival; a flag visible from a distance. I borrowed it and gave it language. CRY ME A RIVER became my first rainbow poem and my first public work. To make a rainbow is to make a promise, that light bends but does not break, that joy and mourning can occupy the same arc.

Since then, the rainbow has become the structure through which I think. There are 17 of them now, each carrying a different phrase. Each phrase is a poem; something that is felt before it is understood.

The new rainbow THE SONG IS YOU arrives at the Royal Academy at a moment when visibility still feels both necessary and fragile. When the right to be seen, to be held, to be named remains contested in too many places and too many lives. The poem is a recognition. YOU, whoever you are, whatever you carry, are not the audience for this work. You are the work itself. Without you passing through, the rainbow is only colour. With you, it becomes meaning.

The courtyard of the Royal Academy is a threshold: a pause between the street and the institution, between the world outside and the world within. I wanted to inhabit that pause. To make it luminous. To make it, for the duration of a single step, yours.

I am grateful to Ryan Gander for the invitation, and to the Royal Academy for the gift of the courtyard; a space open to the sky, to the city and to everyone who crosses it.

Ugo Rondinone, May 2026