We spoke to Ugo Rondinone, the internationally acclaimed artist and designer of this year's Art in Mayfair flags. Flying high above Bond Street until mid-August, enjoy a stroll beneath the 'setting sun' thanks to Ugo's LIGHT flag artwork.
What is the inspiration behind the work?
LIGHT is part of a three-part constellation unfolding across London in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts and its annual Summer Exhibition. What binds all three parts together is light. Not only as a visual phenomenon, but as a shared human experience. Light becomes both the material and the subject of the works: something that moves through the body and the city.
The first part, THE SONG IS YOU is a new rainbow poem installed in the courtyard of the Royal Academy. Suspended three meters above the ground, the rainbow creates an arc beneath which visitors must pass in order to enter the Summer Exhibition. The rainbow transforms the threshold of the museum into a moment of passage, guiding visitors from the street into the space of the institution.
The second part, LIGHT, consists of fifty-four flags installed on Bond Street, Mayfair. Each flag presents a different sunrise or sunset derived from my ongoing sunrise/sunset paintings, a body of work I began in the summer of 2016. As people move through the city, the flags unfold like a sequence of changing skies, carrying viewers through the rhythm of a day.
The third part, MORE LIGHT brings six sunrise and sunset images into the intimate space of the gallery. The paintings are made with watercolour on unprimed cotton using the most reduced means possible: a horizon line and a circle or half circle lightly drawn in pencil, followed by loose washes of colour whose edges remain open. The simplicity of the works with its loose watercolour washes allows the image to exist in a state between appearance and fading away.
Together, the three parts form a progression: from the embodied encounter of the ‘song is you’, to the collective and public experience of ‘light’, and finally toward the meditative interiority of ‘more light’. The projects move from threshold, to city, to inner space; from the singular body, to the collective, to consciousness itself, while remaining rooted in the same elemental vocabulary: rainbow, horizon, sky, sun, moon, colour, light.
Across all three parts, light remains the constant element. Not as metaphor, but as a condition of being. Sunrise, sunset, are universal images that belong to no one and to everyone at the same time. In these works, light becomes a way of thinking about presence, impermanence, longing, and the continuous passage of time.
Why is public art important?
Public space is where most people have their first encounter with art. It can be an initiation. Something that awakens curiosity, encourages people to look more closely, and helps develop a sensitivity to seeing. The greatest thing about public art is that it is free and accessible to everyone.
I remain troubled by the fact that many museums around the world still charge admission fees. Art should not be a privilege. And when I look at many new museum buildings today, they often resemble fortresses more than welcoming places that invite people in.
When people visit Bond Street, what are you hoping they take away from seeing your work?
It is summer. It is light. It is innocent. What could anyone have against a sunrise or a sunset flag? They are simple reminders of something we all share. I hope they offer a moment of pleasure. It’s a happy pill that anyone can swallow with delight and mindlessness.
How does it feel to see your art flying high above Bond Street?
To be honest, my first thought is that Bond Street should be entirely pedestrian.
Beyond that, there is something beautiful about seeing the flags suspended above the street. They transform an ordinary walk into a shared experience. For a moment, the sky becomes part of the exhibition.
When you think of London what comes to mind?
When I was in London for the opening of the three projects, a friend and I decided to visit Bunhill Fields Cemetery in search of the grave of William Blake.
We were initially puzzled to find a stone stating that the remains of Blake and his wife, Catherine Sophia, lay “near by.” Then, a short distance away, we discovered another gravestone inscribed with lines from Jerusalem:
“I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.”
What began as a search for a grave became something more fitting: a search for a poet who remains present everywhere and nowhere at once.
Art in Mayfair is live until mid-August.