The Triumph of Love

‘The Triumph of Love’ is a solo exhibition of new works by the London-based artist Rebecca Stevenson.

Rebecca’s practice involves reassessing the muscular masculinity of the Renaissance from a contemporary perspective. From October 2022 to July 2023, she was artist in residence at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, coinciding with their exhibition ‘Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance’. During the residency, Rebecca focused on creating a dialogue with Renaissance sculpture in the Museum’s collection and that of Donatello in particular. ‘The Triumph of Love’ includes a number of works that were made and exhibited at the V&A, together with new works that build on that foundation, with a specific focus on the human body.

Central to the show are two monumental male heads the speak of the weight of masculinity in art history. One references Goliath under the foot of Donatello’s ‘David’; the second, ‘God the Father’ by Beltramino de Zutti in Milan Cathedral. Both originals are in metal, an ideal material to make a dent in the arc of history. Rebecca has created them in wax, a softer, more mercurial element, endlessly adaptive in creating new shapes and yet destined to be sacrificed in the process of bronze casting. Her Goliath’s head is open like a sea shell, its enormous mass colonised by organic coral shapes whose pink hues enact a tongue-in-cheek ‘feminisation’ of the subject. ‘God the Father’ is festooned with fruits and flowers, symbolic of a fecund Mother Nature and her cycles of birth and rebirth. The severed male head as a feminist motif echoes Judith and Holofernes or Salome and John the Baptist, but in Rebecca’s work, instead of aggression there is regeneration: the repressed feminine element triumphs over the giant via the subtle gesture of transformation.

Thematically this feeds into the Renaissance fascination with metamorphosis, but pushes the focus onto female reproductive power. A circular wax tondo uses the motif of the Madonna and Child to create ‘A Tray of Sweetmeats’, referencing the Renaissance custom of presenting a mother after childbirth with sweetmeats on an elaborately decorated ‘birthing tray’. This work too sprouts fruit and flowers, firmly linking the female body with organic natural growth. A panel in bronze, ‘Miracle’ (acquired for the V&A Collection), depicts the child in the womb, its composition almost fluid despite the hard medium. A pair of accompanying plaques in wax depict the child transformed into a boyish spiritello grappling a snake, a cryptic ancient symbol of transformation. Both Cupid and Memento Mori, this figure is also executed in glass, articulating how life, like fate, is slippery and hard to control, both fascinating and frightening at once.

This sense of the contradictory, of fascination and horror, found expression in the Renaissance love of the grotesque. The word itself stems from cave-like grottos where the raw uncivilised instincts of humanity still dwelt. This is explored in a pair of bronze sculptures that appear to be gilded swans that reveal oversize portraits in their trains. Titled ‘Trumpettes’, their features are bloated by cosmetic surgery in reference to a contemporary reality where the line between beauty and the grotesque seems perpetually fluid. They epitomise the space that Rebecca’s work inhabits: a rich, ambivalent territory where exuberance and a delight in material are used to both celebrate and subvert the conventional narratives of figurative sculpture.