Police are investigating after a sculpture by the artist and broadcaster Grayson Perry was stolen from a Bristol art gallery.
The 27cm glazed ceramic figure, called Alien Baby, was taken from the Hidden Gallery in the Clifton area between 1.15pm and 1.26pm on 30 August, Avon and Somerset police said.
Officers said a man wearing a camouflaged baseball cap and dark zip-up jacket walked up to the limited edition gilded ceramic on display at the gallery.
He was one of two men seen in the area where the piece was stolen, according to police.
Alien Baby was created during the filming for the Bafta-nominated series Rites of Passage in 2018. In the four-episode series, Perry explores the rituals that govern the big moments in our lives including birth, where he spoke with mothers who had given birth to premature babies, and their nurses.
After the series, the Turner prize-winning potter and tapestry-maker, curator, writer and presenter created 12 “alien babies”, “as a way to ritualise and celebrate the NHS, technology and the humanity of the neonatal nurses”, the gallery said. The gilded ceramics were then given to the nurses and individuals featured in the show.
Perry, one of the UK’s most renowned artists, is known for questioning everything from class to gender identity, and primarily, his ceramics. He is also a curator, writer and broadcaster – known for his Channel 4 show Grayson’s Art Club and his touring set, A Show for Normal People.
“Unwittingly, I stumbled across a niche that hadn’t been occupied by anybody in the art world. There is a long history of ceramics, of course, but nobody who had really embraced the conventional craft, the orthodoxies: pots that are pot-shaped, that are fired, that are glazed, that are decorative,” Perry said in 2014.
Hidden Gallery declined to comment on Tuesday.
