Delaine Le Bas: Un-Fair-Ground

In today’s 5 Minutes With a Friend, we speak with Delaine Le Bas about myth-making, material, and the rituals that shape her work. That conversation offers a fitting entry point to her forthcoming exhibition at The Whitworth this spring. Here, Le Bas invites us into a world where the museum becomes porous, mutable, and alive. Un-Fair-Ground is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition since her Turner Prize nomination in 2024, and it is far from a conventional retrospective. Instead, Le Bas transforms the Whitworth’s special exhibition galleries into an immersive, unruly terrain of painting, sculpture, film, costume, fabric, wallpaper and performance, where histories are unsettled and remade.

Delaine Le Bas - NCA Gallery. Photo credit: Toby Lloyd.

Drawing on the idea of the ‘metabolic museum’, a term proposed by curator and thinker Clémentine Deliss, Un-Fair-Ground rethinks how collections operate and whose stories they serve. Le Bas selects more than 20 works from the Whitworth’s collection, spanning 200 years and multiple media, and embeds them within her own installations. Familiar works, including William Blake’s The Ancient of Days, are reframed alongside pieces from the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection, creating an improvisational scenography that resists hierarchy and linear interpretation. Here, objects are not isolated on walls but stitched into a wider material environment, where surface, pattern and texture play a central role...

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Image Credits:

Lead: Delaine Le Bas - NCA Gallery. Photo credit: Toby Lloyd.

All further images as credited in photo captions.