Delaine Le Bas Makes Her Maureen Paley Debut with Leap, a Powerful New Exhibition of Sculpture, Textiles and Murano Glass
Delaine Le Bas: Leap
4th June, 2026 – 25th July 2026
Maureen Paley
4 Herald Street
London E2 6JT
Maureen Paley presents Leap, the first exhibition by Delaine Le Bas at the gallery, marking a significant moment for one of Britain’s most distinctive contemporary artists.
Working across sculpture, textiles, installation, costume and performance, Le Bas has built a practice that moves fluidly between the personal and the political. Her work draws on lived experience while addressing wider questions of land, migration, gender, belonging and discrimination. Over several decades, she has developed a visual language rooted in Romani histories and cultural memory, while challenging entrenched narratives around identity and exclusion.
At the centre of Leap stands The Goddess, a newly conceived sculptural figure that serves as both anchor and connective force within the exhibition. Bringing together handmade elements and found materials, the work incorporates collected textiles, handkerchiefs and vintage fabrics, reflecting Le Bas’s longstanding interest in assemblage and storytelling through material culture.
The sculpture functions as a symbolic call to action, its fragile form revealing a visible heart and a graffitied skirt that reflects contemporary social realities. Positioned at the heart of the exhibition, it links the surrounding works while connecting different periods of the artist’s practice.
Delaine Le Bas Blue House, 2025 murano glass 2
9 x 17.5 x 37.5 cm 113.8 x 67.8 x 143.4 in
© Delaine Le Bas, courtesy Berengo Studio, Murano, Italy and Maureen Paley, London photographer Francesco Allegretto
The exhibition also introduces a new series of Murano glass works produced in collaboration with Studio Berengo in Venice. Created in editions of two, each pair retains visible distinctions, emphasising individuality within processes of repetition and reproduction. For Le Bas, these subtle variations are central to the works’ meaning, reflecting an ongoing interest in difference, identity and material transformation.
Drawing on imagery associated with witches, outsiders and folkloric figures, the glass works continue her exploration of social marginalisation and cultural perception. They evoke personal and collective experiences of England while addressing the persistent realities of exclusion and othering. The title Leap suggests movement across time as much as space. It evokes a gesture that reaches both backwards and forwards, connecting past experiences with future possibilities. Throughout the exhibition, Le Bas shifts between scale, medium and form while remaining grounded in collective histories and deeply personal narratives.
The exhibition arrives at a moment of heightened international recognition for the artist. Following her widely acclaimed exhibition Delainia: 17071965 Unfolding at Tramway, Glasgow, in 2024, Le Bas was nominated for the Turner Prize, further cementing her position within contemporary British art.
Writer John Marchant places Leap within the broader trajectory of Le Bas’s career, noting the artist’s longstanding presence across Europe through installations, textile works and performances that interrogate identity, representation and cultural misunderstanding. Growing up within a Romani family, Le Bas transformed experiences of exclusion into a rich visual language marked by theatricality, fashion and layered symbolism. Marchant observes that Leap brings together historical and newly created works, repositioning them within fresh contexts across walls, plinths and immersive environments. The exhibition encourages audiences to confront institutional complacency, embrace curiosity and recognise the radical potential of joy and imagination.
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About Delaine Le Bas
Born in Worthing in 1965, Delaine Le Bas lives and works in West Sussex, where she collaborates with her partner Lincoln Cato. Her practice has consistently expanded the possibilities of installation, performance and textile-based art, often drawing from Romani cultural traditions while engaging with contemporary social realities.
Earlier this year, the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester presented Un-Fair-Ground, a major solo exhibition of her work. Her recent exhibitions include +Fabricating My Own Myth – Red Threads & Silver Needles at Newcastle Contemporary Art (2025), Delainia: 17071965 Unfolding at Tramway, Glasgow (2024), House of Le Bas at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023), and St Sara Kali George at Worthing Museum and Art Gallery (2021).
Le Bas was among the sixteen artists who established the groundbreaking First Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007 through the project Paradise Lost. Her work has since appeared in multiple editions of the Venice Biennale, as well as the Prague Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Tate Modern’s Critical Contemplations programme and the ANTI Athens Biennale. In 2015, she initiated the ongoing installation and performance project Romani Embassy, extending her commitment to creating spaces for dialogue, visibility and cultural self-representation.
With Leap, Le Bas brings together decades of artistic inquiry into a compelling exhibition that examines how histories are carried, transformed and reclaimed. It is a show rooted in resistance, imagination and collective memory, while remaining open to new forms of connection and possibility.
Delaine Le Bas: Leap opens on the 4th of June, 2026 until the 25th of July 2026 at Maureen Paley
©2026 Maureen Paley
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